KARACHI, Sept 2: A visiting American scholar endorsed the view that the US was wrong in thinking that it could bring democracy to Iraq and the Middle East by force and shared concerns about the American neo-conservatives dominating the policy-making process.

Dr Rodney Jones, President of the Virginia-based Policy Architects International, spelt this out while speaking in the round table on “US-Europe relations in the contemporary scenario” at the Area Study Centre for Europe, the University of Karachi on Friday.

Sharing the participants’ concern about the neo-conservatives’ domineering role in American decision making, Dr Jones said that it was for the first time in American history that its foreign policy had been taken hostage by a small group of ideologues. He expressed the hope that this would be a temporary phenomenon as neo-conservatives, like the communists were ideologues. Their ideology, he said, was dangerous for it was contrary to realities and subversive of democracy.

Dr Jones’ expertise was on national and missile defence, strategic arms negotiations, NATO enlargement and Russia’s national security strategy. He has written extensively on nuclear and security issues, particularly in the context of South Asia.

In his presentation, Dr Jones emphasized that Europe was important for the United States not only in the economic, but also in political and military realms.

Nevertheless, promotion of democracy, the free market and human rights still remained a bonding factor between Europe and the United States. The NATO also found the reason of its existence in the commonality of interests between Europe and the US, especially in the context of peace and stability in Europe and in the new security issues that had appeared on the international scene with the end of the cold war. These included Islamist extremism, terrorism, nuclear proliferation and the spread of mass destruction weapons.

Though Dr Jones agreed with the views of Dr Naveed Ahmad Tahir that the US had initially encouraged Western Europe to integrate in an economic grouping in order to heal the wounds of the second world war; particularly to rehabilitate the western part of Germany into mainstream Europe. He opined that the current impulse for integration was mainly European. Nevertheless, the US and Europe, which had now a formalized relationship had the will and the capacity to resolve their economic disputes, though political disagreements were often more difficult to resolve.

Dr Jones quoted the three major reasons given by the Bush administration for the US war on Iraq. Firstly, the desire to democratize Iraq with the hope that it would have a domino effect on the rest of the Middle East, bringing an end to the authoritarian regimes in the region; secondly to destroy Iraq’s alleged nuclear capability and its weapons of mass destruction. Thirdly, to prevent Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussain from making available his nuclear capabilities to al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups.

Among other participants were Brig A.R. Siddiqui, Prof Shameem Akhtar, M.B. Naqvi and Hafeez R. Khan, besides the research and academic staff members of the Area Study Centre for Europe.

Earlier, Prof (Dr) Naveed Ahmad Tahir, the Director of the Area Study Centre, pointed out that the growing role of the EU as a political actor, especially since its Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) was set up by the Maastricht Treaty, had added the needed depth to US-Europe relationship at a time when the simpler equation of the cold war had been replaced by the messy and often unmanageable regional equations.