<http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB111024408234473024,00.html>
The Wall Street Journal March 8, 2005 GLOBAL VIEW By GEORGE MELLOAN Democracy, Yes, But That's Only a Start March 8, 2005; Page A21 Two recent news photos send a dual message. One is of protesters in Beirut demanding that Bashar Assad remove his Syrian troops from Lebanon. The other is of suspected terrorists confined by barbed wire in an Iraqi detention center. Both the demonstrators and the detainees are young. For the former, the world lends its support. The latter are looked on with fear. The former are fighting for political freedom. The latter are fighting against it. The detainees are worth noting, however. They are healthy youths who in a different kind of society would have been wage earners aspiring to better themselves and start families. They would be providing the productive labor that an economy needs for growth and the spread of prosperity. Instead, they have been engaged in murder and mayhem. What does it take to pacify such people? Or to rephrase the question: What does it take to transform a sick society? Certainly, the establishment of democratic norms is the beginning. The people of Iraq knew that instinctively when they braved terrorist threats to go to the polls and elect their representatives to a national assembly. The young people of Beirut know that as they demand that Syria move its troops and secret police so that an honest election can be held. Even the remaining dictators of the Mideast are coming to understand that people power is a potent force and that the wisest course is to try to deflect it rather than meeting it head-on. That's why Egypt's Hosni Mubarak suddenly decided to let other political parties contest the forthcoming presidential election, with certain qualifications. And it is why both Mubarak and Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia are demanding that Assad yield to the troop withdrawal demands. George W. Bush, defying the doubters and cynics in his own country and Europe, is promoting freedom and democracy as the core of U.S. foreign policy. He has rejected sophisticated theories that Arabs are somehow different and hence incapable of governing themselves in the way that the advanced societies of Christendom have learned to do. We will now see, with the experiment in Iraq, who is right. But so far what we know is that Arabs have just as deep a thirst for political freedom as anyone else. A dawning realization of that truth explains why grudging praise for the Bush policy is now popping up in strange places like the editorial page of the New York Times or the utterances of Democratic partisans. Of course the "freedom policy" is sound. Why wouldn't it be? It is the essence of what the American experience has to offer the rest of the world by way of example. But there is more to the American example than that, and the other part is less likely to be acknowledged by Bush critics and even some of his friends. The American experiment had at its center not only democracy but a liberal, free enterprise approach to economic policy. It involved not only letting people speak and vote freely but also to enjoy legal protections for private property. Those safeguards are explicit in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. They form the basis for a key element of American political and economic development, the ease with which anyone can start a business venture and have it protected by law. The American Revolution was not a sans-culotte uprising as in France. It was primarily a rebellion of property owners, some of whom, like George Washington, were wealthy planters. They resented "taxation without representation" and the conniving efforts of the greedy English nobility to claim the ownership of land in the New World that the colonists had tamed and put to good use. Out of these beginnings grew broad ownership of private farmland. On that solid base, other private ventures sprouted and grew and free market competition evolved. A powerful economy was the result, with millions of people enjoying sufficient economic security to freely exercise the political rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Building a society with both political freedom and broad economic independence in the Middle East will be a daunting task. It wasn't easy even in the U.S. Despite broad ownership of real property, an influential element in American politics still pushes for ever greater restriction by government of economic freedoms. In that broad swath stretching from the Mediterranean eastward, colonialism was not replaced by property rights but by various forms of socialism, which gave rise to dictatorships in places like Egypt, Syria and Iraq. Democracy survived socialism in India, and that country now is finally emerging from that sickness and achieving vigorous growth. The question now is whether democracy will produce the same result in Iraq and perhaps later in Egypt, Syria and other Arab lands. Certainly Arabs had a long tradition of private commerce before colonialism and socialist autocracy. So the genes are there. But it is not clear that even the American bureaucrats who are trying to midwife the transition in Iraq understand the importance of economic freedoms that allow businesses to thrive. They mean well, but their whole experience, by and large, is in the realm of government efforts to "engineer" economic growth, rather than the freeing up of individual creative talents. Mr. Bush's background equips him to understand this, but there are limits to what even a president can do to change ingrained patterns of thought. We'll get some clue to whether the vital economic transformation is occurring when we see fewer Arab young men idling on street corners and more of them applying their skills and energies to the building of businesses and productive farms. The men in the detention camps are there because they didn't want to let go of the power and ill-gotten wealth that a dictatorship awarded them in purchase of their souls. They are fighting a losing battle but that makes them no less dangerous. As to the youths in Beirut, they are trying to reclaim a once-prosperous city destroyed by evil politics. It is indeed a hopeful sign that so much of the world now sees the need to expunge that evil and give them a chance to live decent lives. -- ----------------- R. A. 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