Date:23/11/2007 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2007/11/23/stories/2007112361981100.htm

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West Asia: Vice-President Ansari calls for will to take a correct policy

Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI: Underlining the importance of West Asia in world politics, Vice-President Hamid Ansari on Wednesday stressed on the need to have “the will” to take a correct policy on the region. Observing that any discussion of contemporary West Asia must begin with three questions — what is happening in the region, why is it happening and what is the way out, the Vice-President said diagnosis and commentary on the first and second questions would inevitably propel us towards the third.

“The correctives are suggested by the diagnosis itself. The question is of the will to undertake it. Simple logic, however, is not synonymous with state logic,” the Vice-President said, inaugurating an international conference on “Emerging Security Concerns in West Asia” organised here by the Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation of Germany.

Historical experience

Setting the tone for the two-day conference, the Vice-President pointed out that external security concerns pertaining to West Asia had been around for over a century. Emerging concerns could not be viewed in a vacuum and in a single dimension. “They need to be seen both from the internal and the external perspectives and in terms of the historical experience of individual societies.”

Terming the West Asia Peace Process as “lingering on promissory notes whose encashment has been deferred repeatedly,” he said the quagmire in Iraq had dented the prestige and power of the U.S., which had failed to abandon the doctrine of ‘pre-emptive strikes’ and ‘regime change.’ Its stand-off with Iran was threatening peace in the region as well as the world, he added.

Principal actors

The Vice-President said while the greater part of the region and the population were Arab, the principal actors in the strategic calculus were non-Arabs. The U.S. was faltering due to its policies of unilateralism, creative destruction and pre-emption. “The U.S. has been mauled by non-state actors in Iraq” and “its policies have given impetus to terrorism” while “its intentions are suspect.”