M Serajul Islam
THE National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, both funded by the US state department, among others, for strengthening democracy worldwide, jointly published their report on the January 7 election. Their report hit the bull’s eye. It stated that the January 7 election was a zero-sum event where the ruling party took everything and gave the opposition nothing or zero. There was little else that they could state if they did not want to lie. Sadly, they failed to flag that it was also an election in which the world’s largest and oldest democracies were responsible for the zero-sum outcome.
The US failure to stop the zero-sum outcome of the January 7 election has pushed the democratic, political and electoral rights of Bangladeshis into cold storage for the time being. The failure has also put on the back foot the Biden administration’s much-vaunted Indo-Pacific Strategy’s bedrocks namely human rights and democracy. The election also flagged the failure of the other bedrock of the Indo-Pacific Strategy — its China containment policy. The election allowed China to become the closest foreign power to the Awami League regime in a country where it was a pariah for its anti-Bangladesh role in 1971.
The US ambassador Peter Haas wrote an unusual piece, meanwhile, for a leading English daily newspaper in Dhaka after the election. He admitted that the free, fair and peaceful election that the United States publicly wanted ‘did not happen’, without explaining why. He was in denial that he had passionately pursued what the United States had wanted with delegations from the White House and the state department that had raised the hopes of most Bangladeshis that the political and other rights that they had lost after the Awami League assumed office in January 2009 would be restored because the United States had come behind them unsolicited by going openly against the Awami League as its adversary and threatened it consequences if it failed to hold the election the way it wanted.
Ambassador Haas mentioned in the letter that the Biden administration was still serious about democracy and human rights in Bangladesh. The news was like the boy crying wolf in the fable to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party that ignored it as did those who had pinned hopes on Haas’s promise that the United States would support their struggle to regain their rights. The ruling party welcomed the ambassador’s letter because it flagged that Washington’s threats of sanctions and other consequences that it had made to force the AL regime to hold a free and fair election were ‘full of sound and fury that signified nothing.’
The ambassador’s letter, nevertheless, pointed at a much bigger malaise in the Biden administration’s foreign policy worldwide. The administration started well by ending the two decades’ war on terror in August 2021 during which the United States had held the Muslims hostage for the faults of a handful of them. Its interference in Ukraine against Russia sent out the message that the United States was prepared to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of small nations against big bullies in international politics. The Indo-Pacific Strategy strategy that the Biden administration launched in February 2022 enhanced optimism in the Indo-Pacific region with 65 per cent of the world population about the US role as champion of democracy and human rights.
Biden’s failure to condemn Israel and hold it answerable for its crimes against humanity in Gaza that started in October 2023 was the antithesis to the Biden administration’s promises in Ukraine, with its IPS or by ending the war on terror. Israeli armed forces killed 27,000 Palestinians in Gaza between October 7, 2023 and February 1, 2024, with the carnage continuing. The death included 19,000 women and children, 85 journalists and 202 health workers. The government of South Africa filed a case of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice. The court, in an interim report, reminded Israel of its obligations under the Genocide Convention after finding the intent of genocide in Gaza.
The Gaza genocide profoundly stirred the world conscience because Israel’s acts of cruelty were brought home to everyone worldwide through instant communication technologies available to all and sundry these days. The death of children by inhuman acts of Israeli armed forces was seen and felt globally causing Israel its worst public relations disaster of all time. Israel’s cryptic rejection of the ICJ’s interim report as ‘antisemitic’ failed for the first time to rekindle the holocaust that Israel had used successfully to justify its genocidal intent in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The Israeli claim to Palestinian land is based on the Jewish belief they are God’s ‘chosen people’ that non-Jews have no reason to accept. The Muslims, Christians and the Jews lived peacefully for millenniums in the lands over which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is taking place. The British that have the discredit of leaving conflicts behind in most of the nations that they had colonised on being forced to free them, like the Indo-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir, were also the midwife of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
The Ottomans, Muslims themselves, ruled for centuries the lands of present-day Israel and Palestine. The British gained control over these lands as spoils of World War I after they defeated the Ottomans with their allies. Britain announced the Balfour Declaration in 1918 to create the state of Israel on Palestinian land on the Jewish claim that they were the ‘chosen people.’ The Israelis, not satisfied that the British-created Israel on Palestinian land for them, had started their systematic move to make the Palestinians permanent refugees since Israel became independent in 1948.
The ongoing war against humanity in Gaza is the implementation stage of the Israeli blueprint of an Israel including Palestine free of the Palestinians by any means. The United States on a bipartisan basis supported this blueprint with an out-of-the-box attempt by president Clinton during his 1992–2000 terms with the two-state solution. A main reason the United States supported Israel was the power of the Jewish lobbies in providing oxygen for US politics, namely finances for conducting politics. Arguably, another reason has been the anti-Muslim feelings of US politicians, a factor that has existed among Christians worldwide since their defeat to the Muslims in the eight crusades fought between 1096 and 1291 AD.
Biden took Israel’s side in the present Gaza conflict based on the perception of his past three predecessors who believed Muslims to be at fault in any conflict with non-Muslims. It was a support that the president should have taken with a serious pause that he did not. He was too interested in pleasing the Jewish lobbies that he had done during his years as a senator and US vice-president in the two terms of president Obama. In his hurry, he ended up holding a hot potato that could become the Waterloo for his re-election.
The health of the economy was the most important factor in deciding most presidential elections in recent memory. The elder president Bush learnt this the hard way. He started the 1992 election with an unsurmountable lead based on winning the First Gulf War. Meanwhile, the economy went into a recession that swept away his lead. President Clinton’s adviser James Carville’s famous quip on television ‘It is the economy, stupid’ explained bluntly without the need for details why president Clinton, a political lightweight, succeeded in defeating an incumbent president, a rare occurrence in US politics.
The US economy is now in an excellent health. Ironically, it may not help president Biden’s re-election chances because, in a reverse replay of the 1992 presidential election, the 2024 presidential election is shaping to become ‘it is foreign affairs, stupid’ kind of election. Biden’s advisers supported Israel at a time when US voters and the world were watching Israel’s intent of genocide in Gaza in real time. They have, thus, opened the doors for president Trump to become the second president after president Cleveland in 1892 to return to the White House after a break unless president Biden’s advisers wake up with the election, still many months away, and do some real damage control.
Biden’s foreign affairs advisers made the same mistake in Bangladesh in choosing India as its indispensable ally for the Indo-Pacific Strategy. They wasted a heaven-sent opportunity of taking the United States to the pinnacle of popularity by listening to India and that too to allow the Bharatiya Janata Party to win the next Indian election on the Hindutva mantra. Biden’s 2020 campaign team described the Hindutva mantra as the same as president Donald Trump’s white extremism or white supremacy for which it had barred Indian American groups in the United States supporting the Bharatiya Janata Party from coming near the campaign. Public memory, it appears, is short everywhere.
M Serajul Islam is a former career ambassador.
New Age