Condoleezza Rice defends US policy despite Mideast strife

PARIS: Eleven months after saying the world was witnessing "the birth pangs of a new Middle East," US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended US policy in the face of strife in Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza.

Rice was ridiculed for having made the remark last July during the war between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon by critics who believe the Bush administration has drastically undermined the stability of the Middle East.   

Asked about the comment at a news conference with French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, Rice on Sunday argued Iraq was better off for the 2003 ousting of Saddam Hussein as was Lebanon for the 2005 departure of Syrian troops from its soil.   

"Democracy is hard. And I see it is especially hard when there are determined enemies who try and strangle it," Rice said when a reporter referred to her "birth pangs" remark and asked how the "the baby" was doing nearly a year later.   

Rice took issue with the idea that the Middle East was more "stable" before the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein and unleashed the brutal insurgency in Iraq.   

"What stability? The stability in which Saddam Hussein put 300,000 people in mass graves -- that was stability? The stability in which Syrian forces were embedded in Lebanon -- that was stability?" she asked.   

"The stability in which Yasser Arafat turned down an opportunity for the Palestinian people to have their own state -- that was stability?" she added, alluding to the failure of US-brokered peace talks between the late Palestinian leader and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak in 2000.       

More than 3,500 US soldiers and an estimated tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died since the US-led invasion gave rise to the insurgency and ethnic strife in Iraq.   

While Syrian troops have left Lebanon, the country remains divided between the Western-backed government led by Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and the Hezbollah opposition.   

Siniora has sent Lebanese troops to fight guerrillas from Fatah al-Islam, an al Qaeda-inspired Sunni group, in a Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli for the past five weeks.   

US efforts to promote Israel-Palestinian peace have made little progress, in part because of the internal Palestinian split between President Mahmoud Abbas of secular Fatah and Islamist Hamas, which won parliamentary elections last year.   

The United States has tried to strengthen Abbas in his struggle with Hamas, which Washington views as a terrorist group.   

The power struggle erupted into outright warfare this month when Hamas forces defeated Fatah to take control of Gaza, effectively splitting the Palestinians between the coastal strip dominated by Hamas and the West Bank ruled by Fatah.   

"It's hard for democracy to take hold in a place in which it has not taken hold before but I am confident about the triumph of these values because I have seen it happen before," Rice said.    

Shibley Telhami, a professor at the University of Maryland, rejected Rice's analysis.   

"If before the Iraq war someone could have described the scenario that we now face in the Middle East, especially in Iraq, the Palestinian territories and Lebanon, as a possible outcome of the war, the Bush Administration -- and everyone else -- would have seen this as a nightmare scenario," he said.   

"People want more liberty for sure, but they fear the anarchy they witness in Iraq and reject foreign occupation even more strongly than they desire democracy," Telhami added.