'New World Order' that only led to tragedy

Independent Decade

George Bush promised us the New World Order, "a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations". The Gulf would become an oasis of peace from which the weapons of war would be banned. There would be - so James Baker's letters of invitation to the 1991 Middle East conference in Madrid promised the Arabs land for peace. Yet within just half a decade, the entire promise proved to be a lie.

The Kurdish tragedy, initially ignored by Messrs Bush and Major, is still being played out. Within a year, the law of the jungle was turned against the people of the former Yugoslavia and the nations which supposedly fought for the rule of law against Iraq watched supinely as the Muslims of Bosnia were slaughtered. And the Arabs who trusted Bush's promises have discovered that his successor is content to allow Israel to change the terms of the "peace process" and keep Arab Jerusalem and most of the occupied Arab territories.

Even now, few seem to appreciate the power of the explosion that is about to detonate in the Middle East. After refusing to look for the fatal flaws in the separate peace deals struck between Israel and the PLO and Jordan, the world's press is finding it difficult to explain the inevitable collapse. American commentators are insisting that a Palestinian "plot" lay behind the actions of Palestinian policemen to "turn their guns" on Israelis last month - Benjamin Netanyahu's phrase obediently taken up by the New York Times' Charles Krauthammer - as if Israeli soldiers had not been "turning their guns" on Palestinians for a decade. The European Union, persuaded to invest in a disastrous peace, has been denied by the US a place at the talks intended to save it. So much for the conduct of nations.

Perhaps Europe is better out of it. For what is happening in the Middle East is nothing less than the collapse of Washington's entire policy, a debacle that is likely to prove America's Suez. Just 40 years ago, it was President Eisenhower who was trying to restrain Britain, France and Israel; now it is Europe that is trying to restrain America and Israel. For the Arabs, the inevitable losers - whom we will be asked to blame - the prospects are even bleaker.

After the First World War, the British and French encouraged tribal emirs and kings to rule a divided Arab world. And after 1945, the Americans were content to see their roles taken over by Arab colonels and generals, such as King Idris and his successor Colonel Gaddafi, and King Farouq and his successors Colonel Nasser and General Sadat. Israel's own leaders were almost invariably retired generals or guerrilla leaders - Dayan, Begin, Shamir.

As long as these military cliques obeyed a set of basic rules, they were left unmolested. Their job was to suppress revolutions, either communist or Islamist. Only one revolution has come to be tolerated, now that it has been emasculated: Yasser Arafat's. And only one nation was allowed to break UN Security Council resolutions with impunity: Israel.

Now, however, the explosion - or implosion - in the Middle East is sending the first tremors of an earthquake through the barrack rooms of the Arab world. Our friendliest army officers, Mubarak and King Hussein, sold their pro-Western alliance to their peoples on the grounds that they would bring both peace and prosperity - and that America's word could be trusted.

But everything they were promised is now being taken away. A just peace is evaporating before their eyes as a right-wing Israeli government refuses to implement signed agreements and seizes more Arab land. An American president facing an imminent election not only refuses to criticise Netanyahu but fires off cruise missiles into Iraq in an attempt to sustain his image as a warrior.

And to varying degrees, all these Arab leaders are faced with a violent "religious" opposition. It murders policemen and tourists in Egypt. It sets off suicide bombs in Israel. It beheads opponents by the thousand in Algeria. We call them mindless "terrorists" - principally because we do not wish to discuss the reasons for their ferocity - but Israel has its terrorists too, who slaughtered Palestinians in a Hebron mosque and murdered Israel's own prime minister. If we are to be worried about the rise of fundamentalist states, the Arabs are asking, what has Israel become? True, the Arab kings and generals can continue to suppress their domestic opposition with the noose, the torture chamber, the executioner's sword and the death squad as well as the bogus election.

But for how much longer, after the near-civil war between Palestinians and Israelis? There are few Arabs who now believe in those Western promises just half a decade ago, of the rule of law, of the just peace. What is American leadership and strength now worth? Bush promised a new world order. But all Clinton could do last week was to appeal, pathetically, to an increasingly hostile world to "please, please give us a chance to make this thing work in the days ahead ..." Could there be more devastating proof of America's weakness and its path to folly in the Middle East?