Democracy and the neocons: a marriage of convenience
By Jim Lobe
Special to The Daily Star
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Of all the delusions that American neoconservatives perpetrated in their drive to take the US to war in Iraq, the most durable was the notion that they were committed to the spread of Wilsonian democracy. As someone who has watched the neocon movement over the past 30 years or so, I find this hard to accept.
My skepticism is based on several factors, including the obvious selectivity of the neocons. After all, one has only to look at their support for authoritarian regimes in Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Tunisia and Jordan - as opposed to their eagerness to invade Iraq in the name of bringing democratic rule there - to find some glaring inconsistencies. At the same time, it is the neocons who pushed hardest for US President George W. Bush to cease dealing with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, though he was elected by a substantial majority of eligible voters in the West Bank and Gaza. Indeed, neocon hard-liners like former Pentagon official Richard Perle believe Palestinians should be denied self-determination altogether.
Without doubt, neocons have long professed a devotion to democracy. Indeed, their main argument in favor of a US strategic alliance with Israel - a central and persistent tenet of the neoconservative creed over the past three decades - has been the Jewish state's status as the lone democratic outpost in a region of seething and hate-filled Arab autocracies. The question, however, is whether democracy promotion, especially in the Arab world, ranks anywhere nearly as high in the neocons' policy priorities as their commitment to Israeli security. And to the extent that they may perceive a potential conflict between the two, which one are they inclined to choose as the more important?
A brief look at the historical record may help provide an answer. While the neocon movement sprouted wings in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as Israel found itself increasingly isolated at the UN, neoconservatives first tasted real power under former President Ronald Reagan, who was especially taken with Jeane Kirkpatrick's attacks on Jimmy Carter's human rights policies. According to her, these were disastrously undermining "friendly authoritarian" regimes in Iran, Nicaragua, South America, and even apartheid South Africa - all governments enjoying friendly relations with Israel. Instead of hectoring such regimes on reform, she argued, Washington should have provided them with unstinting support as allies in the global struggle against Soviet communism, both because Moscow was the far greater evil, and because authoritarian regimes could become "democracies," while "totalitarian" ones could not.
�Reagan applied these ideas. During his first term, Washington not only renewed military and other forms of support to "friendly authoritarians," but also began the Reagan Doctrine - the sponsorship of right-wing "freedom fighters," such as jihadists in Afghanistan, tribal nationalists in Angola and ex-National Guard figures in Nicaragua, who distinguished themselves more by fanaticism and brutality than by the democratic arts. At the same time, neocons were ecstatic with Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon - not because it furthered the cause of democracy, but because it meant the expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon and a shift in the regional balance of power against Soviet-backed Syria.
So, if neocons were not big democracy boosters during their period of greatest influence under Reagan, when did they discover their religion? Most analysts date their conversion to the last half of the 1980s, when the "people power" movement ousted Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and when Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet was defeated in a referendum to extend his rule. In both cases, prominent neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams were serving at the top of the State Department bureaus dealing with Asian and South American affairs. Neocon pundits were quick to embrace these perceived deviations from the "Kirkpatrick doctrine" as a necessary correction, particularly in light of the winding down of the Cold War.
While Wolfowitz and Abrams sided with those who wanted to remove the two "friendly authoritarians," so did a significant number of Republican lawmakers, some of them classic realists like Senator Richard Lugar, who had already broken with Reagan and the neocons over their support for South Africa. In that respect, the neocons were as much fellow travelers as they were in the vanguard, as they like to claim.
The neocon record throughout the 1990s reinforced this conclusion. Contrary to myth, neocons, including Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary today who is widely considered the most Wilsonian on the neocon spectrum, did not urge former President George H. W. Bush to plant democracy in Baghdad during the 1991 Gulf War. And although neocons did join with liberal hawks in calling for "humanitarian interventions" after the war, and subsequently in the Balkans, they remained well within what became the post-Cold War realist consensus - that elected, more or less democratic governments, so long as they were not hostile to the US, were to be preferred over "friendly authoritarians."
Thus, when the Algerian military abruptly canceled elections in December 1991, neither realists nor neocons objected, because the alternative was thought likely to bring to power an Islamist government potentially hostile to the US, and certainly to Israel. Indeed, in their book "An End to Evil" published last January, Richard Perle and David Frum cite Algeria as the reason why they support "democratization" in the Middle East, rather than "democracy"- a subtlety that would bring a smile even to the lips of ultimate realist Henry Kissinger.
Similarly, when the neocons first began agitating for Saddam's removal in 1995-96, their arguments were based entirely on classic realpolitik of the kind they used to defend Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Thus, a 1996 task force advising Israeli candidate Benjamin Netanyahu, headed by Perle and that also included the Pentagon's current policy chief, Douglas Feith, as well as David Wurmser, a Middle East adviser to Vice-President Dick Cheney, argued that ousting Saddam was the key to transforming the balance of power in the Middle East decisively in Israel's favor, permitting it to "break" with Oslo and dictate terms to Syria and the Palestinians.
A follow-up paper by Wurmser called for the region to be reorganized according to "tribal/clan/familial alliances" that would create a "more stable balance of power system." In 1998, when the neocons and Ahmad Chalabi were steamrolling the Iraq Liberation Act through the US Congress, the legislation's supporters, like the neocon-dominated Project for the New American Century (PNAC), focused on the military threat posed by a rearmed Saddam. Even in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, when PNAC warned that the failure to oust Saddam would constitute a "decisive surrender" to international terrorism, the democracy question was simply nowhere on the agenda.
It was only after the Afghanistan campaign that the neocons finally began to articulate the argument, denounced by one realist strategist as "neo-crazy," that anti-American terrorism was caused by oppressive Arab autocracies, and that by invading and occupying the most oppressive such regime, in Iraq, the US could create a pro-Western, democratic government in the strategic heart of the Arab world that would, in turn, provoke sweeping regional change.
On the face of it, the argument has real appeal, particularly for the more idealistic neocons, such as Wolfowitz. To the increasingly pro-Likud neocon mainstream, however, it must sound like a great way to rally public opinion behind a war to permanently shift the balance of power in the Middle East.
Jim Lobe is the correspondent of Inter Press Service in Washington. He wrote this
commentary for THE DAILY STAR
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