The way I see it, the world is menaced by two forces: Washington, Tel
Aviv, and their clients on one hand, and international jihadists on
the other hand. The American, European, and Japanese publics being
apathetic and quiescent, in the short term, the only forces on the
ground who can protect civilizations, East and West, from them are
left Islamists.
Ken Silverstein, who previously did a good job reporting on death
squads in Iraq for Harper's ("The Minister of Civil War: Bayan Jabr,
Paul Bremer, and the Rise of the Iraqi Death Squads," 20 July 2006,
<http://www.harpers.org/the-minister-of-civil-war-399309.html>), has a
new article in Harper's, an excerpt from which is available online.
It's about the rise of Islamic democracy. Leftists should accept the
rise of Islamic democracy, and those leftists who are in a position to
make a practical difference (not here in the USA but in the Middle
East, Russia, China, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere) should do what they
can to support those Islamsits who are capable of democratizing their
countries, defending their countries from Washington's, Tel Aviv's,
and their clients' military and other interventions, and marginalizing
international jihadists at the same time.
<http://www.harpers.org/PartiesOfGod.html>
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Parties of God
The Bush Doctrine and the rise of Islamic democracy
By Ken Silverstein.
Among the precepts of the "Bush Doctrine"—as loyalists to the current
president call the set of foreign-policy principles by which they, and
no doubt he, hope his tenure will be remembered—by far the most widely
admired has been his stance on democracy in the developing world. The
clearest articulation of this stance can be found in a November 2003
speech at the Washington headquarters of the United States Chamber of
Commerce, when Bush sharply denounced not just tyranny in the Arab
states but the logic by which the West had abetted it. "Western
nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle
East did nothing to make us safe—because in the long run, stability
cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty," he said. "As long as
the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it
will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for
export." Saying it would be "reckless to accept the status quo," Bush
called for a new "forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East." At
least in its rhetoric, this was nothing less than a blanket
repudiation of six decades of American foreign policy.
Since the president's speech, democracy's cause has suffered a series
of setbacks in the Middle East. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has been
arresting government critics and has rejected calls to hold elections
for even a toothless "consultative council." (The kingdom has no
parliament.) In Egypt, which receives $2 billion per year in American
aid, President Hosni Mubarak was "reelected" two years ago in a
landslide, nine months after his regime jailed his primary challenger,
Ayman Nour, on the spurious charge that he had forged signatures for
his party's registration. Political repression has also increased in
Jordan, another recipient of vast U.S. financial aid. The government
has imposed new restrictions on free speech and public assembly, a
crackdown designed to squelch overwhelming domestic opposition to the
regime's close alliance with the Bush Administration.
Notwithstanding President Bush's new "forward strategy of freedom,"
the United States has marshaled nothing more than a few hollow
demurrals against the antidemocratic abuses by its allies, and it
maintains close partnerships with all of America's old authoritarian
friends in the region. When reaching out to opposition figures, it has
chosen pro-Western elites such as Nour in Egypt or Ahmed Chalabi in
Iraq, both of whom are more admired in Washington and London than they
are at home.
Above all, America has refused to engage with Islamic opposition
movements, even those that flatly reject violence and participate in
democratic politics. It is true that many Islamists long rejected the
concept of elections, which the more radical of them still argue are
an infringement on God's sovereignty; others rejected democracy
because they believed, with good reason, that elections in their
countries were so flagrantly rigged that they offered no realistic
path to change. (Of course, Islamic groups that did seek to campaign
in elections were frequently barred from doing so by dictatorial
regimes.) But since the 1990s, growing numbers of Islamists have
concluded that reform from within can be achieved gradually, through
electoral politics.
Today, there are dozens of active Islamic political parties, both
Shiite and Sunni, with diverse political and ideological agendas.
Their leaders are certainly not liberal democrats, and some, like
Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon, maintain armed wings. But
it is not entirely accurate to describe them, as is frequently done in
the United States, as fundamentalist or backward or even necessarily
conservative. The new Islamic movements are popularly based and
endorse free elections, the rotation of power, freedom of speech, and
other concepts that are scorned by the regimes that currently hold
power. Islamist groups have peacefully accepted electoral defeat, even
when it was obvious that their governments had engaged in gross fraud
to assure their hold on power. In parliaments, Islamists have not
focused on implementing theocracy or imposing shari'ah but have
instead fought for political and social reforms, including government
accountability.
And increasingly the Islamists have numbers on their side. Were
democracy suddenly to blossom in the Middle East today, Islamist
parties would control significant blocs, if not majorities, in almost
every country. Hamas swept to victory in the Palestinian elections of
2006, in a vote among the freest ever seen in the Middle East. [1]The
Shiite group Hezbollah, which, like Hamas, is designated by the U.S.
State Department as a terrorist organization, picked up parliamentary
seats in Lebanon's 2005 national balloting and entered the cabinet for
the first time. Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood—despite being officially
banned, and despite massive fraud and violence against supporters—won
eighty-eight seats in parliament two years ago, making it by far the
largest opposition bloc. The Islamic Action Front, Jordan's major
Islamic party and a wing of the local Muslim Brotherhood, is generally
considered to be the country's best-organized political movement and
won 15 percent of the parliamentary seats in the most recent election.
One need not endorse either the ideology or the tactics of these
groups to wonder if the wholesale rejection of dialogue with them is
truly in the long-term interests of the United States. Indeed, looking
beyond the disastrous war in Iraq, perhaps the central questions
facing American foreign policy are as follows: How is it possible to
promote democracy and fight terrorism when movements deemed by the
United States to be terrorist and extremist are the most politically
popular in the region? And given this popularity, what would true
democracy in these nations resemble? It is impossible to answer these
questions without first listening to these movements, but the U.S.
government and, frequently, the media have deemed them unworthy even
of this; their public grievances—over America's seemingly
unconditional support for Israel, its invasion of Iraq, its backing of
dictatorial regimes that rule much of the Muslim world—are dismissed
as illegitimate or insincere, their hostility explained away as a
rejection of "Western freedoms." In fact, as I discovered during my
own visits with Islamist leaders over the past year, these groups are
busy forging their own notions of freedom, some of them Western and
some of them decidedly not. If we want to envision a democratic future
for the region, we need not embrace these ideas, but we most certainly
need to understand them.
* * *
To write with any nuance about Islamists for an American audience is
to invite controversy. I experienced this firsthand a year ago when,
as a staff reporter for the Los Angeles Times, I visited Lebanon for a
story that discussed Hezbollah's evolution from its origins during the
country's civil war and the basis for its popularity. My trip fell
during Muharram, a ten-day religious holiday for Shiites; during the
holiday, Nasrallah was speaking in the southern suburbs every other
night, and I went to see Hussein Nabulsi, head of Hezbollah's media
relations center, to ask if it would be a problem for me to attend.
Nabulsi initially balked, but after looking me up and down he quickly
relented: given my dark features, thin beard, and blue jeans, he
concluded that I would be indistinguishable from most party militants.
He insisted, though, that I speak no English while in the crowd and
that I find a local Shiite to accompany me to the event. This latter
role was filled by Mostafa Naser, an industrious, neatly groomed man
in his mid-twenties who had been recommended by my rent-a-car agency
when I had asked for a driver well acquainted with the southern
suburbs.
That night we parked on a main road in the Dahiyeh and joined a stream
of thousands of people heading to an auditorium in the heart of Haret
Hreik, the district where Hezbollah's political offices are located
and where Nasrallah was to speak. After passing through three
checkpoints, where we were patted down for weapons, we reached an
auditorium decorated with green, black, and red flags commemorating
Muharram. (The first is the color of Islam; the second conveys grief
for the death of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, the Imam Hussein,
who was killed along with his followers at Karbala in 680 a.d.; and
the last signifies Hussein's blood.) We dropped our shoes near the
entrance and then tiptoed through the packed crowd, which was divided
between men on the left and women on the right.
Nasrallah took the stage with such little fanfare or applause that I
first mistook the man at the podium for a political warm-up act. Even
to a non-Arabic speaker, Nasrallah's charisma was readily apparent. He
spoke for an hour, seeming never to refer to notes, and kept the crowd
alternately applauding and pumping fists throughout. Naser
periodically whispered a few translated snatches from the speech,
which mixed religious and political messages. Heavy anti-Israeli
commentary drew a particularly noisy response; the crowd erupted in
laughter when Nasrallah derided the United Nations as an American
toady and heaped scorn on its call for Hezbollah to disband its
militia.
As unsettling as Nasrallah's cult of personality may be, much of what
I saw in the Dahiyeh surprised me. Although the area is often referred
to as "Hezbollahland," it hardly has the feel of a so-called
Islamofascist state. At corner cafés, men and women sip small cups of
thick, black coffee or "cocktails" made with fresh fruit topped with
whipped cream. In a small Christian section, bars serve
alcohol—cloudy, anise-flavored arak is particularly popular—and
attract a fair number of Shiite clients. Many women wear a long gown
and hijab, the traditional Islamic head scarf, but Western-style
clothing is not uncommon, and there were no Hezbollah Revolutionary
Guards to enforce dress codes. On the street one day I saw a Shiite
woman decked out in a short blue-jean skirt, low-cut top, and black
boots—unusual dress for the area, to be sure, but she drew hardly a
glance. Beyond such matters, it was obvious that Hezbollah was
organically rooted in Lebanese political, social, and cultural life
and that reducing it to the standard caricature—"terrorist
group"—would be grossly misleading. [2]
I also saw how important it was to lay out Hezbollah's own political
narrative, which is frequently given short shrift, at best, in
American accounts. For example, virtually any news story about the
group will recite the litany of civil war‒era attacks on American
targets in Lebanon, especially the bombings of the U.S. Embassy and
the Marine barracks. But at the time, many Lebanese Muslims saw the
United States as a hostile force that had intervened in the civil war
on behalf of Israel and its Lebanese Christian allies in the
government; the attack on the Marine barracks came after American
warships battered antigovernment positions with shells. And although
Hezbollah's control of its own militia is clearly untenable in a
democratic Lebanon, the party's explanation for why it has thus far
refused to disarm—that is, to defend against Israel—is hardly without
merit from a Shiite point of view. Since 1982, some 20,000 people in
Lebanon, many of them Shiite civilians, have been killed by Israeli
attacks, and Hezbollah's militia is the only entity in the country
that represents any type of credible deterrent force.
After submitting my story, though, I ran up against insurmountable
editorial obstacles. It was clear that I was deemed to have written a
story that was too favorable to Hezbollah, even though any article
seeking to examine its popularity would, by necessity, require some
focus on the group's more attractive aspects. After the story was near
completion, a new editor was called in to review it because, I was
told, Hezbollah had a history of inviting reporters to Lebanon and
controlling their agenda. The obvious implication was that this had
happened in my case—despite the fact that, outside of my interviews
with Hezbollah officials, I had had no contact with the party. I had
hired my own driver (who turned out to be sympathetic to Hezbollah,
like most Shiites, but not connected to the movement) and translators
(all Christians), with no restrictions placed on where I went or who I
met with; and in fact I had spent significant time with the group's
critics.
The primary problem, it soon became clear, was fear of offending
supporters of Israel. At one point I was told that editorial changes
were needed to "inoculate" the newspaper from criticism, and although
who the critics might be was never spelled out, the answer seemed
fairly obvious. I was also told in one memo that "we should avoid
taking sides," which apparently meant omitting inconvenient historical
facts. Over my repeated objections, editors cut a line that referred
to "Israel's creation following World War II in an area overwhelmingly
populated at the time by Arabs." That, I was told in an email from one
editor, David Lauter, was the Arab view of things. Israelis would say,
with some justification, that much of the area wasn't overwhelmingly
populated by anyone at the time the first Zionist pioneers arrived in
the first part of the 20th century and that the population rose in the
mid-decades of the century in large part because of people migrating
into Palestine in response to the economic development they brought
about.
But that argument, which in any case doesn't refute what I wrote, was
long ago rejected by serious Mideast scholars, including many in
Israel. It also avoids confronting a root cause of the conflict.
According to the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the original Zionist
governing body in what was to become Israel, there were roughly 1.1
million Arab Muslims living in Palestine at the time of
partition—twice the number of Jews. "Perspective is everything," I
replied in an email to the editors. "If my name was Mostafa Naser and
I grew up in the southern suburbs of Beirut, I seriously doubt I would
be an ardent Zionist. If we can't even acknowledge that Arabs have a
legitimate point of view—and acknowledge what the numbers show—we
caricature them as nothing more than a bunch of irrational Jew
haters." As I noted in a conversation with one editor, religious
hatred, on both sides, is an element in the conflict, but it is
fundamentally a struggle over land and national identity. If an Eskimo
state had been created in Palestine in 1948, one suspects that
anti-Eskimo feeling would have increased markedly in the Arab world.44
When I asked Musawi about the Holocaust denial that has been espoused
by some Arab leaders, and suggested it reflected an unwillingness to
acknowledge Jewish suffering, he replied, "We are not denying that
European racists persecuted an entire people or belittling the
suffering of the Jewish people, and we say this with utter frankness
and without compliment. But Europeans committed those crimes, and then
we were made to pay for them with our land." After days of unfruitful
negotiations, and a final edit that in my view gutted the story, I
decided to pull the piece rather than "inoculate" it to the point of
dishonesty.
* * *
You can find the entire article March Harper's Magazine on newsstands now.
Notes
1. In response to the vote, which was held with U.S. support,
President Bush cut off aid to the new government and announced that
the United States would not speak to its leaders. [Back]
2. Another misconception that sometimes comes from American journalism
is the impression, conveyed deliberately, one suspects, that meeting
with Hezbollah requires a singular combination of unflinching
perseverance and steely nerves. Such accounts are flattering to the
writer but enormously misleading. Hezbollah is a media-savvy
organization with a press office that is generally eager to help
Western reporters. [Back]
This is Parties of God, a feature by Ken Silverstein, originally from
March 2007, published Thursday, March 1, 2007. It is part of Features,
which is part of Harpers.org.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
