Obama Faces Difficulty in Helping the Arabs

The efforts of the Obama administration to grant funding to the Arab countries experiencing the travails of democracy hit a snag after Congress, which is concentrating on more necessary expenses like balancing the national debt, blocked the grant.

The American administration is exploring its options, especially the request for debt forgiveness put forward by Egypt to the tune of $3.3 billion. The administration accepted a similar request from Tunis, but in doing so forgave a lesser debt valued at only $7 million. However, according to U.S. officials, the budget battles going on these days in Washington make it impossible to fulfill all the requests for forgiveness.

U.S. lawmakers were not appeased by simply closing the door on any new allocations to support stability in countries witnessing what has been called the “Arab Spring”; they also opposed proposals to partially trim funding for international aid programs supporting Arab countries.

Administration officials say that this support will assist in bringing historical change into effect in the Arab region. American officials also fear that economic setbacks may strike the new democracies in Cairo and Tunis — each of which witnessed the fall of its dictatorship this year — with paralysis, which could lead Egyptians and Tunisians toward Islamic groups that constitute a threat to America’s strategic interests.

Opponents of material support say that they support democratic change in the Arab world, but that they will not fund it.

Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a member of the Budget Committee in the House of Representatives, said “there’s just no appetite to spend more money. When we can’t pay our own bills, it’s difficult to justify nation-building in foreign countries.”

Bitter Fighting

Opposition in Congress can partially be attributed to the influence of members of the tea party and other conservatives who have long opposed aid programs for foreign countries. They have just about forced the American government to engage in a bitter fight over the budget deficit.

Some American lawmakers are haunted by doubts after figures showed the expenditure of billions on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan throughout the past decade, and some representatives say the administration did not put forward a convincing case to justify expenditures on the Arab countries currently witnessing a state of change.

Resistance from American lawmakers forced the American administration to orient itself toward foreign and international donors like the European Union, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Nevertheless, these efforts by the Obama administration have achieved limited success.

Likewise, the American administration tried to convince the European states, which froze the assets of Egyptian officials accused of corruption, to use these funds to help the new government in Cairo.

Pivotal Regimes

One Obama administration official says “these are pivotal regimes in a pivotal region.”

He mentions that a project to aid these nascent democracies along the lines of the American plan used in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union was suggested last month, but it also faced harsh opposition within the U.S. Congress.

Administration officials thought of changing the face of American military assistance to Egypt in this way, and sending it to the government instead of the army, but the House of Representatives opposed this idea for two reasons: The first reason being fear of the impact of this change on American firearms sellers, and the second is a fear that this would mean decreased American military support for Israel. The total value of American military assistance to Egypt and Israel has been linked together since the ‘80s.

Egyptians contend that the U.S. needs to waive its debt, which has reached $3.3 billion and is tied to the export of American wheat to Egypt. The Egyptians feel that the United States should not demand the debt piled up on them by the government of former President Hosni Mubarak. In addition, there is a precedent in this area, i.e. Washington’s 2005 cancellation of the debt owed by Iraq at a value of $4 billion. This debt was accumulated during the reign of deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Rep. Gary Ackerman contends that such a step will encourage the countries of Eastern Europe to advance a similar request for the U.S. to waive its $9 billion in security-related debt.