The Middle East and North Africa are witnessing a dance of democracy. Televisions and newspapers around the world are full of praise for the protestors that have already brought down the well-entrenched regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, and are on the verge of toppling Gaddafi in Libya. It is enthusiastically speculated that this democratic wave will have a domino effect that will overthrow the rest of the Arab regimes, one after the other.
Reporters and analysts are projecting this popular upsurge as the march of democracy. Nobody is in a mood to seriously analyse the forces behind this unrest. The most common explanation touted is that the incumbent regimes are oppressive, corrupt and in power for too long; hence these revolutions.
Revolutions are generally preceded by momentous events; there were none before this upsurge. Revolutionary crescendo is carefully generated by the writings of revolutionary thinkers but there is a total absence of Arab Rousseaus, Voltaires, Montesquieus or as a matter of fact Marxs on the Middle Eastern scene. Moreover, revolutions are midwifed by revolutionary leaders but one fails to find the likes of Lenin, Mao, Gandhi or Mandela in this Arab melodrama. Then, who are the authors of these revolutions and where are they?
Actually, these are carefully scripted revolutions whose editors are safely sitting thousand of miles away in the United States of America. These are the owners of the giant multinational corporations (MNCs), who are employing the tools of globalisation such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the Internet as a whole to destabilise the sitting governments in order to gain unrestricted access to the resources and markets of this area in the name of free trade. Over the years, they have successfully blended the idea of the free market with democracy.
Presently, the Arab monarchies and autocracies have personal stakes in the resources and businesses of their countries which directly clash with the interests of the transnational companies (TNCs). Thus these regimes have to be replaced with pliant democratic dispensations to usher in an era of free trade. The US government simply acts as the executive arm of the MNCs to bring about such changes because the largest corporations in terms of revenue are based there. Moreover, it is a fact that corporations represent fifty-two of the hundred largest economies in the world.
Iraq was chosen as a test case to pursue this agenda and the experiment remained successful because the economic policies implemented by the democratic government of Baghdad under the US tutelage were in perfect accord with the demands of the US corporations. While writing in the Wall Street Journal of May 1, 2003 Neil King Jr. commented, Iraq is now the test case for whether the US can engender American-style free market capitalism within the Arab world.
Consequent to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the awarding of reconstruction projects, some of the TNCs reaped mind boggling dividends. For example, for Chevorn, the year 2004 with an earning of $13.3 billion turned out to be the most profitable year in its 125-year history. Halliburtons stock price nearly quadrupled in value between 2003 and 2006 while Lockheeds stocks more than tripled between 2000 and 2006. In effect, by 2005, about 150 US companies were awarded contracts to the tune of $50 billion. This greed has an in-built vicious mechanism. A significant amount fleeced by these corporations land straight in the coffers of the Republican and Democratic parties that rule the US. In this way, the vital interests of the political class and the big business are happily wedded.
After Iraq, they set their eyes on the whole of the Middle East and North Africa. This became quite evident from the 2003 speech of John Gibson, the chief executive of Halliburton: We hope Iraq will be the first domino and that Libya and Iran will follow. We dont like being kept out of the markets Later on, these aspirations loudly echoed the same year in the May speech of the then President George W Bush: I propose the establishment of a US-Middle East Free Trade Area(MEFTA) within a decade, to bring the Middle East into an expanding circle of opportunity It seems as if by instigating the ongoing political turmoil, the stage is being set to impose a neo-imperialist agenda in the Mideast. The proposed MEFTA will include twenty countries that possess about two-thirds of the worlds oil that is presently controlled fully or partially by the state oil companiesa situation unacceptable to the MNCsthat would like to formulate new rules on foreign investment and ownership to their maximum advantage.
Today, an Arab fills his fuel tank from a state-run and not a Chevron fuel station. He drinks from a bottle of domestically produced Saha water than Pepsis Aquafina. Similarly, he gets his cash from the Saudi Cairo Bank and not from Citibank ATMs. At the moment, just 1 percent of US foreign direct investment and less than 5 percent of all US exports go to the Middle East but the US corporations are eager to own banks, factories and stores to sell large quantities of pharmaceutical drugs, bottled water, jeans, etc. and the MEFTA will serve as the leading route to bring such a change.
This change could be achieved through the catalysts of freedom and democracy. The then US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, who, now, heads the World Bank argued in a Washington Post op-ed on September 20, 2001 that free trade and freedom were inextricably linked. Subsequently, this mantra was incorporated in the September 2002 US National Security Strategy document which enunciated that We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world. Once, free trade and free markets were made synonymous with freedom and included in the security strategy, the US government could implement it with military force.
The attack on Iraq was just the beginning and Libya is in crosshairs. Where the democratic protests will fail to bring the incumbent rulers on their knees, external military intervention may be used to sort them out. In the name of freedom and democracy, the Arabs are taken for a ride. The entire melodrama being played in the Middle East is nothing more than an act of immaculate deception.
The writer is an academic and journalist. He can be reached at [email protected]
