It was held against the Neoconservatives, throughout former President George Bush's two terms in office, that they were ideological – in other words, that they had placed goals for their foreign policy based on their own view of the world, including our region. The invasion of Iraq represents the pinnacle of putting such a view to practice. The Democrats, who came to power with President Barack Obama, assumed that merely disengaging from direct military action in Iraq would mean correcting the previous ideological methodology, and thus correcting America's deteriorating image in our region, where the United States presumably has vital national interests, especially in terms of energy. There have been Arab wagers on the Obama Administration's ability to emerge from its predecessor's arrogant ideological methodology, and to effectively open up to the concerns of the peoples of the region, who yearn for real democracy and just distribution of wealth, and before that to activate a productive economy that can generate live forces concerned with stability and respecting the state of law. There have also been wagers on its ability to protect the rights of peoples, including the Palestinian people toiling under the occupation of the US's ally, and to work seriously to ward off Israeli aggression against them and force Israel to respect the national and humane right of Palestinians to their land. This rosy picture of what the Obama Administration could do did not last long. Indeed, it soon found itself confronted to Israel, backtracking before it in a humiliating manner and making light of the minimum of human rights for Palestinians and of their aspiration to a decent life in an independent state. Here, in fact, it cancelled out the notion of human rights as a value that should be defended anywhere, leaving the rights of Palestinians to face raw Israeli violence, and indeed defending such violence in its various forms, physical, economic and political. The image of the US stance on such rights thus received a fatal blow, not just among the peoples of our region, but also at the level of US foreign policy in general. And today comes the defense of human rights, at the occasion of the events taking place in Tunisia and in Egypt, in an attempt to polish this image. One certainly cannot defend the practices of Arab authorities in general, and particularly not in Tunisia and in Egypt. Yet there are several circumstances and factors that have made the two countries turn into the scenes of a clash with authorities, and they are circumstances and factors that involve a combination of mismanagement, corruption, tyranny, human rights violations, economic failure and a dead-end future, alongside the invisible ideological struggle for power and resources. These popular demands and aspirations have taken the form of a clash with the regime in place, this because of a double dead-end situation: the dead-end the regime finds itself in, being disconnected from reality in its every aspect; and the dead-end the protest movement finds itself in, being disconnected from political reality and from the state. This is why a political leadership of the protest movement has been absent from the forefront and violence has been the only means available both ways, sometimes reaching mob-like practices. This is where the US has intervened in the name of human rights, in a manner that brings to mind what Washington used to do during the Cold War, when it spoke of the peoples behind the Iron Curtain. This took place in Tunisia and is now taking place in Egypt, making human rights a political instrument, not a value in itself. Indeed, in the name of such rights, arrangements were made for Ben Ali to relinquish power to the benefit of a situation controlled by Tunisia's military institution, and it seems that the idea of a similar situation might be taking shape in Egypt. While asserting the differences between the two experiences, the United States wants to ensure an alliance with any future regime, after considering the current regime to now be threatened, and there is nothing like human rights to serve as the banner for such a policy. Yet the imagined shape for a future democratic life lacks any internal basis, in light of the complete absence of internal productive economic forces that have a real interest in stability and the interests of which are unaffected by the alternation of power. In either case, any new regime will once again witness the rise of an elite benefiting from the revenue of power. Whether alone or allied with Islamist forces on the rise, the military institution, which was once assumed to protect stability, will in the best of cases have only the choice of not repeating the experience of the former regime, with all of the horrendous practices that drove people to the streets. As for the human rights the United States is currently raising as its slogan, they aim only at reserving a position of influence in the next regime.
