Published on Sunday,March 15, 2005 by TomPaine.com
The Democracy Lie
President Bush and his supporters are taking credit for
spreading freedom across the Middle East. Middle East
expert Cole disputes the domino theory in the region and
labels Iraq--at best--a failed state. Where changes are
genuinely occurring they have nothing to do with the U.S.
invasion of Iraq.
by Juan Cole
Is George W. Bush right to argue that his war to overthrow
Saddam Hussein is democratizing the Middle East? In the
wake of the Iraq vote, anti-Syrian demonstrations in
Lebanon, the Egyptian president's gestures toward open
elections and other recent developments, a chorus of
conservative pundits has declared that Bush's policy has
been vindicated. Max Boot wrote in the Los Angeles
Times, "Well, who's the simpleton now? Those who dreamed of
spreading democracy to the Arabs or those who denied that
it could ever happen?" In a column subtitled "One Man, One
Gloat," Mark Steyn wrote, "I got a lot of things wrong
these last three years, but looking at events in the Middle
East this last week ... I got the big stuff right." Even
some of the president's detractors and those opposed to the
war have issued mea culpas. Richard Gwyn of the Toronto
Star , a Bush critic, wrote, "It is time to set down in
type the most difficult sentence in the English language.
That sentence is short and simple. It is this: Bush was
right."
Before examining whether there is any value to these
claims, it must be pointed out that the Bush administration
did not invade Iraq to spread democracy. The justification
for the war was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass
destruction and links to Al Qaida--both of which claims
have proved to be false. And even if one accepts the
argument that the war resulted, intentionally or not, in
the spread of democracy, serious ethical questions would
remain about whether it was justified. For the purposes of
this argument, however, let's leave that issue aside. It's
true that neoconservative strategists in the Bush
administration argued after 9/11 that authoritarian
governments in the region were producing terrorism and that
only democratization could hope to reduce it. Although they
didn't justify invading Iraq on those grounds, they held
that removing Saddam and holding elections would make Iraq
a shining beacon that would provoke a transformation of the
region as other countries emulated it.
Practically speaking, there are only two plausible
explanations for Bush's alleged influence: direct
intervention or pressure, and the supposed inspiration
flowing from the Iraq demonstration project. Has either
actually been effective?
First, it must be said that Washington's Iraq policy,
contrary to its defenders' arguments, is not innovative. In
fact, regime change in the Middle East has often come about
through foreign invasion. Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser
intervened militarily to help revolutionaries overthrow the
Shiite imam of Yemen in the 1960s. The Israelis expelled
the PLO from Lebanon and tried to establish a pro-Israeli
government in Beirut in 1982. Saddam Hussein briefly
ejected the Kuwaiti monarchy in 1990. The U.S. military's
invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam Hussein were
therefore nothing new in Middle Eastern history. A peaceful
evolution toward democracy would have been an innovation.
Has Bush's direct pressure produced results, outside Iraq--
where it has produced something close to a failed state?
His partisans point to the Libyan renunciation of its
nuclear weapons program and of terrorism. Yet Libya, hurt
by economic sanctions, had been pursuing a rapprochement
for years. Nor has Gadhafi moved Libya toward democracy.
Washington has put enormous pressure on Iran and Syria
since the fall of Saddam, with little obvious effect. Since
the United States invaded Iraq, the Iranian regime has
actually become less open, clamping down on a dispirited
reform movement and excluding thousands of candidates from
running in parliamentary elections. The Baath in Syria
shows no sign of ceasing to operate as a one-party regime.
When pressured, it has offered up slightly more cooperation
in capturing Iraqi Baathists. Its partial withdrawal from
Lebanon came about because of local and international
pressures, including that of France and the Arab League,
and is hardly a unilateral Bush administration triumph.
What of the argument of inspiration? The modern history of
the Middle East does not suggest that politics travels very
much from one country to another. The region is a
hodgepodge of absolute monarchies, constitutional
monarchies and republics, characterized by varying degrees
of authoritarianism. Few regimes have had an effect on
neighbors by setting an example. Ataturk's adoption of a
militant secularism in Turkey from the 1920s had no
resonance in the Arab world. The Lebanese confessional
political system, which attempted to balance the country's
many religious communities after independence in 1943,
remains unique. Khomeini's 1979 Islamic Revolution did not
inspire a string of clerically ruled regimes.
Is Iraq even really much of a model? The Bush
administration strove to avoid having one-person, one-vote
elections in Iraq, which were finally forced on Washington
by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Despite the U.S. backing
for secularists, the winners of the election were the
fundamentalist Shiite Dawa Party and the Supreme Council
for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Nor were the elections
themselves all that exemplary. The country is in flames,
racked by a guerrilla war, a continual crime wave and a
foreign military occupation. The security situation was so
bad that the candidates running for office could not reveal
their identities until the day before the election, and the
entire country was put under a sort of curfew for three
days, with all vehicular traffic forbidden.
The argument for change through inspiration has little
evidence to underpin it. The changes in the region cited as
dividends of the Bush Iraq policy are either chimeras or
unconnected to Iraq. And the Bush administration has shown
no signs that it will push for democracy in countries where
freedom of choice would lead to outcomes unfavorable to
U.S. interests.
Saudi Arabia held municipal elections in February. Voters
were permitted to choose only half the members of the city
councils, however, and the fundamentalists did well. The
other half are appointed by the monarchy, as are the
mayors. The Gulf absolute monarchies remain absolute
monarchies. Authoritarian states such as that in Ben Ali's
Tunisia show no evidence of changing, and a Bush
administration worried about Al Qaida has authorized
further crackdowns on radical Muslim groups.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak recently announced that he
would allow other candidates to run against him in the next
presidential election. Yet only candidates from officially
recognized parties will be allowed. Parties are recognized
by Parliament, which is dominated by Mubarak's National
Democratic Party. This change moves Egypt closer to the
system of presidential elections used in Iran, where only
candidates vetted by the government can run. The Muslim
Brotherhood, the largest and most important opposition
party, is excluded from fielding candidates under its own
name. Egypt is less open today than it was in the 1980s,
with far more political offices appointed by the president,
and with far fewer opposition members in Parliament, than
was the case two decades ago. As with the so-called
municipal elections in Saudi Arabia, the change in
presidential elections is little more than window-dressing.
It was provoked not by developments in Iraq but rather by
protests by Egyptian oppositionists who resented Mubarak's
jailing of a political rival in January.
The dramatic developments in Lebanon since mid-February
were set off by the assassination of former Prime Minister
Rafik Hariri. The Lebanese political opposition blamed
Syria for the bombing, though all the evidence is not in.
Protests by Maronite Christians, Druze and a section of
Sunni Muslims (Hariri was a Sunni) briefly brought down the
government of the pro-Syrian premier, Omar Karami. The
protesters demanded a withdrawal from the country of Syrian
troops, which had been there since 1976 in an attempt to
calm the country's civil war. Bush also wants Syria out of
Lebanon, in part because such a move would strengthen the
hand of his ally, Israel. Pro-Bush commentators dubbed the
Beirut movement the "Cedar Revolution," but Lebanon remains
a far more divided society and its politics far more
ambiguous than was the case in the post-Soviet Czech
Republic and Ukraine.
On March 9, the Shiite Hezbollah Party held massive pro-
Syrian demonstrations in Beirut that dwarfed the earlier
opposition rallies. A majority of Parliament members wanted
to bring back Karami. Both the Hezbollah street
demonstrations and the elected Parliament's internal
consensus produced a pro-Syrian outcome obnoxious to the
Bush administration. Since then the opposition has staged
its own massive demonstrations, rivaling Hezbollah's.
So far, these demonstrations and counterdemonstrations have
been remarkable in their peacefulness and in the frankness
of their political aims. But rather than reference
Washington, they point to the weakness and ineptness of the
young Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who made the error
of tinkering with the Lebanese constitution to extend the
term of the pro-Syrian president, Gen. Emile Lahoud.
Although some manipulative (and traditionally anti-
American) opposition figures attempted to invoke Iraq to
justify their movement, in hopes of attracting U.S.
support, it is hard to see what these events in Lebanon
could possibly have to do with Baghdad. Lebanese have been
holding lively parliamentary campaigns for decades, and the
flawed, anonymous Jan. 30 elections in Iraq would have
provoked more pity than admiration in urbane, sophisticated
Beirutis.
Ironically, most democratization in the region has been
pursued without reference to the United States. Some Middle
Eastern regimes began experimenting with parliamentary
elections years ago. For example, Jordan began holding
elections in 1989, and Yemen held its third round of such
elections in 2003. Morocco and Bahrain had elections in
2002. All of those elections were more transparent than,
and superior as democratic processes to, the Jan. 30
elections in Iraq. They all had flaws, of course. The
monarch or ruler typically places restraints on popular
sovereignty. The prime minister is not elected by
Parliament, but rather appointed by the ruler. Some of
these parliaments may evolve in a more democratic direction
over time, but if they do it will be for local reasons, not
because of anything that has happened in Baghdad.
The Bush administration could genuinely push for the
peaceful democratization of the region by simply showing
some gumption and stepping in to resolve the Israeli-
Palestinian dispute. There are, undeniably, large numbers
of middle- and working-class people in the Middle East who
seek more popular participation in government. Arab
intellectuals are, however, often coded as mere American
and Israeli puppets when they dare speak against
authoritarian practices.
As it is, the Bush administration is widely seen in the
region as hypocritical, backing Israeli military occupation
of the West Bank and of the Golan Heights (the latter
belonging to Syria) while pressuring Syria about its troops
in Lebanon, into which Kissinger had invited Damascus years
ago. Bush would be on stronger ground as a champion of
liberty if he helped liberate the Palestinians from
military occupation and creeping Israeli colonization, and
if he brokered the return of the Golan Heights and Shebaa
Farms to Damascus in return for peace between Syria and
Israel. The end of Israeli occupation of the territory of
neighbors would deprive the radical Shiite party in
Lebanon, Hezbollah, of its ability to mobilize Lebanese
youth against this injustice. Without decisive action on
the Arab-Israeli front, Bush risks having his
democratization rhetoric viewed as a mere stalking horse
for neoimperial domination.
Bush's invasion of Iraq has left the center and north of
the country in a state of long-term guerrilla war. It has
also opened Iraq to a form of parliamentary politics
dominated by Muslim fundamentalists. This combination has
little appeal elsewhere in the region. The Middle East may
open up politically, and no doubt Bush will try to claim
credit for any steps in that direction. But in Jordan,
Yemen, Lebanon and elsewhere, such steps much predated
Bush, and these publics will be struggling for their rights
long after he is out of office. They may well see his major
legacy not as democratization but as studied inattention to
military occupation in Palestine and the Golan, and the
retrenchment in civil liberties authorized to the Yemeni,
Tunisian and other governments in the name of fighting
terrorism.
Juan Cole is a professor of modern Middle Eastern and South
Asian history at the University of Michigan. He runs a blog
on Middle Eastern affairs called Informed Comment. This
article first appeared on Salon.com.
� 2005 TomPaine.com ( Project of The Institute for
America's Future )
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