Condoleezza Rice travelled earlier this week to the heart of the Arab world — carrying a message to Riyadh and Cairo, capitals of Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
Rice — or “Condi,” as she is known affectionately to her friends and admirers — is the U.S. Secretary of State; the public face of the world’s greatest democracy in international affairs.
A little over 60 years ago, then U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat and leader of the anti-fascist alliance in WWII, secretly went to meet with King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, the Saudi monarch and founder of the House of Saud. This was the meeting that laid the basis for the U.S.-Saudi alliance through the Cold War years, and has been maintained by 11 administrations since Roosevelt’s — even after the attack carried out by Saudi citizens on Sept. 11, 2001.
But there is no more Soviet Union, the Cold War is long over, and the old problems of global poverty and the widening chasm between developed and developing countries persist, while fanatics of the Arab-Muslim world, having declared a war against America as the “Great Satan,” are hell-bent to drive the Middle East backward into a future of their imagined medieval dystopia.
It is in this context that the message Condi Rice delivered in Cairo and Riyadh becomes as significant as the meeting of Roosevelt with Ibn Saud.
In addressing an Egyptian audience gathered at the American University in Cairo, Rice observed: “For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East — and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.”
To those in the Middle East who say America has no business imposing democracy, or any other form of government in the region, Rice’s response is, “Democracy is never imposed. It is tyranny that must be imposed.”
Rice’s message is a critical component of the “Bush doctrine,” enunciated in the second inaugural address of President George W. Bush, to assist in the advance of democracy in the Mideast as a requisite for prosperity and peace in the region.
The Arab world consists of 22 countries with a combined population of nearly 300 million and possesses more than two-thirds of the known global oil reserve, and yet its gross domestic product — the measure of an economy — is smaller than that of Spain. Failing politics and economy have made for a dysfunctional society and breeding ground of terror.
There is a delicious irony in hearing Rice speak about freedom and human rights to an Arab audience whose leaders and intellectuals ceaselessly speak about their civilization being among the oldest in the world.
Here is an immensely gifted black woman, a descendant of African slaves, representing America and speaking to the Arab world from a city that once represented the heart of Arab nationalism. She speaks about human dignity, and declares that “liberty is the universal longing of every soul, and democracy is the ideal path for every nation.”
Egypt under President Hosni Mubarak, aging and nearly 25 years in office, receives $3 billion annually from the United States. This is the foolish wage America pays for stability in the country deemed strategically important as the most populous state of the Arab world.
Fulfill the promise
But a recipient of American assistance has no basis to protest when informed, as the Egyptian government was by Rice, that it “must fulfill the promise it has made to its people — and to the entire world — by giving its citizens the freedom to choose.”
It is indeed the civilizational challenge for Arabs, instead of dismissing Rice, to show their hopes and dreams are no different than anyone else’s, and they are no less deserving of freedom’s bounty.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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