 |
PRESENTATION BY
NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL PROFESSOR
VALI R. NASR
SATURDAY, JUNE 23, 2008
Islam and democracy has become an important trope through which Americans and many in the West look at the Muslim world and at the problems they see confronting the United States in the Muslim world. In some ways, it’s not a new debate. The issue of Islam and democracy has been debated – at least in academia – and in the public sector for a number of years. The issue came to the fore in the 1990s as a way of asking why the Muslim world wasn’t following the democratic wave that was sweeping over Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Asia at the time.
Since September 11, however, the issue of “Islam and Democracy” has found greater urgency. Public debate blamed the pains of dictatorship in the Arab world for the attacks, and the Iraq war, at least at some level, was justified in terms of democratizing the Muslim world. This really brought the question of why hasn’t there been more democratization or more democracy in the Muslim world to the fore.
Whose fault is it that the Muslim world isn’t more democratic? The debate usually focuses on Islam, and the role it plays in hindering or facilitating democracy. Islam is a religion that emphasizes close adherence to law. This is particularly true of the narrow interpretation of Islam employed by fundamentalist groups. Many argue that Islam is incompatible with democracy because it believes that sovereignty lies solely with God. Interestingly, this is not a new assertion. Similar assertions were made about Catholicism in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, when people argued that Portugal, Spain, and Latin American nations were lagging behind in democracy because they were Catholic and because this hierarchical religion didn’t allow for pluralism and diversity of opinion. So, in some ways, we’ve returned to the same old debate.
Is there something in religion that prevents it from helping democracy? Off the bat, I’m willing to agree that no religion is compatible with democracy because, ultimately, religion is about absolute truth. Every religion, at its core, is about absolute truth, and democracy, by definition, is about relative truth. So the question is not whether religion is compatible with democracy. I would say it isn’t. The question is under what circumstances can they co-exist and when can societies be democratic despite the religious beliefs held within them.
The issue of Islamic reform has been discussed a lot recently. It posits that, in order for Muslim societies to democratize, they have to undergo some kind of a reformation, some kind of a process parallel to what we saw in Christianity with the rise of Protestantism, and then, the changes that Protestantism undertook in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Again, this debate is not new. The political scientist Samuel Huntington famously argued that the reason why Latin America ultimately became democratic was because of Vatican II reforms in Catholicism – that Catholicism ceased to be the old Catholicism. Now whether you agree with him or not, one could say that even if under the current Pope they’re going back on many tenets of Vatican II that doesn’t mean that Catholicism is going to become once again incompatible with democracy.
Despite the limitations of Huntington’s argument (even if the current Pope backslides on Vatican II, that doesn’t mean that Catholicism would become incompatible with democracy once again), it has become a singular argument in the Muslim context. The West is fascinated by the search for a Muslim intellectual figure who could play the role of a Luther – somebody who could change the face of Islam and water down its religious laws (much like conservative and reform Judaism reduced the power of Talmudic law in Judaism and allowed Judaism to integrate into European societies and democracies of the 19th and 20th centuries).
But before we put too much faith in the reformation process, we have to be aware of a few important caveats. One is that reformation, even if it was to be successful, is a very slow process. Even in Europe in the case of Christianity and Judaism, it took a long time. As it’s not possible to time it, Islamic reformation is not a ready-made, silver bullet answer to the Muslim world’s political, socioeconomic, or foreign policy problems any time in the immediate future.
Second, it’s not a given (even in the European context) that reformation is necessarily or immediately liberal or democratic. For instance, Calvin’s Geneva was by no means a paragon of democracy. And it is not a given that even if this process were to begin in the Muslim world, it would immediately lead toward democratization.
Third, this emphasis on Islamic reformation is problematic because the United States and Europe are much more interested in it than are Muslim countries themselves. Islamic reform is not yet a homegrown idea. It is seen as an imported idea designed to solve American problems, not Muslim problems.
In order for people in Muslim countries to put their faith in Islamic reformation, it needs to be responsive to their concerns. For instance, Islamic reform met with some success in Iran in the 1990s because the population saw these reforms as a direct solution to their political and socioeconomic problems.
Now, if religious reform is unlikely to happen before democratization, we need to ask ourselves three questions: (1) can democracy co-exist, flourish, or at least emerge in the Muslim world as it is now and can it co-exist alongside Islamic forces?; (2) can “Islamist forces” (e.g., political parties with a distinctly Islamist agenda that seek creation of an Islamic state) be tamed by democracy or co-exist with democracy and how are they likely to respond to democracy? The first two questions lead to an even more important one: (3) can democratization force reform on Islam, rather than it being the other way around?
These three questions are important because, as we debate whether Islam can or cannot co-exist with democracy and whether there will or won’t be Islamic reform, there is actual democratic practice happening on the ground in many Muslim countries. There is far more voting, electoral activity, and debate about electoral activity in the Muslim world than westerners tend to notice
India is one of the best examples of a Muslim country with democratic experience. By all estimates, India is the second largest Muslim country in terms of population size. Indian Muslims have participated in general, local, and municipal elections since the state’s creation in 1947. By some estimates, India has had 9 or 10 national, general elections in which people participate, vote, read party platforms, and make decisions about which party will better represent them by doing basic things like improving schools and roads. These elections have taught Indians – both Muslim and Hindu – the rules of the democratic game. Thus, in India democratic practice has been unfolding without there first having been Islamic reform. Americans often say that India is the world’s greatest democracy, but it’s important to realize that the world’s 2nd-largest Muslim community is a key participant in this great democracy.
The example of India demonstrates that a person’s belief in the Shar’ia [Muslim law] does not preclude him or her from participating in democratic processes. However, how Muslims behave in the electoral process is a different question and the answers differ from country to country.
Iran presents a very interesting case. Iran is the first Islamic fundamentalism state, insofar as it was built by an Islamic revolution. And it’s still a theocracy in its own conception and according to its Constitution. But Iran ended up adopting electoral practices not because anyone had read Rousseau or was enamored by Rousseau, but because the Iranian elite could not sort out how to distribute offices and power without taking the issue to their constituencies. Elections in Iran are essentially limited to party members who are loyal to the regime. Only they can run and it was expected, early on, that only these loyalists would vote. While Iranian elections are far from perfect, there have been some nine presidential elections and 30-some parliamentary municipal elections.
Iranian elections raise some interesting issues. One is that those who participate take these elections very seriously, and there is actual competition for votes and an actual give-and-take with the population on the issues they care about. Unsurprisingly, when you go below the national level, Iranians cast their votes in municipal elections based on who does a better job clearing the streets, managing traffic, and providing economic and social services to the populace.
Iran has made slow progress, but progress nonetheless, toward democratic reform. Just 2 or 3 months ago when former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami was visiting Washington, I asked an Arab journalist covering Khatami’s trip to Washington, “What’s most interesting to your audience about this visit?” He said it was “the concept of a former president. The fact that you can have a former head of state living in his own country who can come to Washington and New York and give lectures that defy his own sitting President, then go back to his own country, it hasn’t existed here.” Iran has two former Presidents who both stepped down at the end of their respective terms, something that was previously unheard of.
Another interesting thing about Iran is that it’s not secular, middle-class Iranians who are pushing for democratic reform. These people have always been so cynical about elections and about the Islamic republic that they didn’t participate before the 1990s and they don’t participate often even now. Ironically, the more religious, less well-off members of Iranian society are more democratically literate than the middle-class. So even though Iran is a theocracy, a product of Islamic fundamentalism, it has more electoral practice than many other countries with secular regimes do. Again, I’m not saying that Iran is the perfect democracy, but Iranians have had more experience with the rudiments and basics of democracy than many of their neighbors have. This has nothing to do with Islam. It has everything to do with the opportunities Iranians have had to practice campaigning and voting.
Outside the Middle East there are other cases – like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Turkey – where we are seeing democratic practices entrenching and deepening, irrespective of the supposed “necessary prerequisite” of religious reform. Where does this new reality of democratic participation leave Islamic forces? American policymakers got used to repeating that “Islamic forces in the Middle East just don’t like democracy and that’s why they’re opposing American projects in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.” While it’s true that Islamic parties used to say that they didn’t want to have anything to do with democracy because it was a western ideal that didn’t place sovereignty in god as Muslim teachings demand, non-participation is no longer the reality on the ground in many Muslim countries.
Many Islamic parties currently participate in electoral processes and have adopted a wide range of positions. Some have basically agreed to participate in elections, but have not adopted any major ideological changes. Some of them have undertaken serious changes in their platforms, their positions, and their policies. And some of them have come to see pragmatism as more important than ideological fervor at this point in time and have decided to participate in the electoral process. In fact, the three most important Islamic fundamentalist parties in Pakistan, Malaysia, and Bangladesh have routinely participated in national elections and now hold seats in all three countries’ Parliaments. That doesn’t mean that they’re moderate voices or that they don’t push for their own agendas or that they don’t try to change laws in the direction they want, but the idea that democracy is abhorrent to them and they’re not going to touch it, is clearly no longer the case.
Some Islamist parties have also demonstrated a willingness to change so as to be viable electoral competitors. For instance, in Turkey after it became very clear that the AKP, Turkey’s Islamist party, would need to change its religious-based platform before it would be allowed to participate in national elections, it repeatedly did so. Ultimately, in 2002, the AKP (which is currently ruling over Turkey for all practical purposes) gave up on the idea of the Islamic state, accepted the secular Kemalist state, accepted the parameters of Turkey’s secular constitution, and participated in national elections.
In Egypt, there have been important debates within the Muslim Brotherhood about what kinds of changes the party should adopt and under what conditions should it participate in elections. The same debates are also occurring within the Muslim Brotherhood in Kuwait, Jordan, and Morocco. In contrast, the increased political participation of Islamic parties in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories has not led them to change or tone down their ideological rhetoric.
In coming years, we’re likely to see any number of different directions taken by Islamic parties in the Muslim world. A lot of this doesn’t have anything to do with Islamic ideology per se; instead, it has to do with the balance of power, constituent demands, and the political realities these parties confront in their home countries.
But what about the voters in Muslim countries? All too often, the subtext of all this discussion of Islam and democracy isn’t so much about what the Islamic parties think or whether they’re too ideologically extreme to be allowed to participate, but about how devout Muslims are likely to derail democracy any time they vote en masse. Again, the evidence from actual elections makes it very clear that Muslims care a lot about Muslim issues. They want Muslim values in the public sphere. They’re not necessarily in agreement as to the meaning of the phrase “Muslim values” or as to whether these values are reconcilable with other interests, but they clearly want Islam to have a presence in public life.
Importantly, many parts of the Muslim world don’t want an Islamic state any more than they want a purely secular state. In countries like Pakistan, where Islamist parties have participated in elections since the country’s inception, these parties generally don’t get more than 20 percent of the vote. But more moderate and sometimes secular parties who put some kind of Islamic language in their platforms garner a bigger percentage of the vote. This proves that both religious and non-religious values matter to Muslim voters. You are not going to have democracy in many parts of the Muslim world without religious values playing a role, just like they do in the United States now.
Again, support for virulently ideological Islamic parties that demand creation of Islamic states is not always strong. In the Palestinian territories, Hamas did very well in the last election. Hezbollah does very well among its constituency in Lebanon. But in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey, Malaysia, and Indonesia we don’t see the strong electoral support for hard-line religious parties. And most often, religious parties that do well, do well because they run on issues of governance, competence, jobs, honesty, and basically on who collects the garbage. In Turkey, the current moderate Islamist government [the AKP Party] made its name on its successful management of Istanbul from 1992 and to the present, and cemented its position by effectively managing the response to the 1999 Istanbul earthquake. Many Turkish observers liken the AKP’s 2002 victory to a [metaphorical] tsunami that followed the earthquake.
In many other societies, Islamic parties have trust and political support not because of ideological position, but because of competition over jobs, governance and those kinds of issues. I mean even today, as we’re talking, the debate in Turkey, which is the most successful case of integration, is that the Turkish military is trying to make an issue of the AKP party’s Islamic roots and potentially Islamic agenda. The Turkish military wants their countrymen cast their votes in the upcoming July election on the basis of headscarves. But the AKP Party is running on a very different set of issues. It’s running on its record in the city of Istanbul (which it’s still controlling) and in the city of Ankara, and its running on the facts that, since it came to power in 2002, the Turkish economy at a rate of 7 percent per annum and over $50 billion of foreign capital has been invested in Turkey. That’s the record that the AKP party would like to run on. Even in the Palestinian Territories, part of Hamas’s message all along has been the corruption of the ruling Fatah party. Governance has been a major argument in past election campaigns in the Muslim world and it will continue to be a major argument in the future campaigns.
It’s also important to realize that simply holding an election does not necessarily reduce people’s choices to Islam versus democracy. In many cases, other issues come are determinative. In the Iraqi election, even though we thought that the issue was between Islam and democracy, or between democracy and secularism, in the end, ethnic and sectarian divisions dominated the voting. Similarly, Washington expected the 2005 Iranian elections in 2005 to yield a “Ukrainian moment,” where the population would use the vote to decide between theocracy and democracy and between secularism and Islam. But, in the end, Iranians voted on the basis of populism and jobs. The current president ran on a platform of stopping privatization of the economy, protecting subsidies to the poor, and providing subsidies to the smaller provinces. He appealed to the poor and the lower-middle class against the middle class and the private sector.
Pakistan is likely to hold elections in the fall of 2007. Again, we think of Pakistan and its current president in terms of secularism versus Islam. We hope that the issue for most Pakistanis would be democracy versus Islam. But more than likely, the issue that’s going to be dominant in these elections is going to be dictatorship versus democracy. Individual rights versus a dictatorship. We’re already seeing alliances emerging in Pakistan between Islamist parties, ethnic parties, and secular pro-democracy parties against the military.
Notably, in countries that have had experience voting in multiple elections, religious parties tend to moderate their voice; it is also true that secular parties in these countries tend to adopt religious voices. This only makes sense because, ultimately, when you’re competing votes in a religiously conscious population, you have to gravitate toward the values that the electorate responds to. In Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, parties that had been secular in the 1980s and 1990s gradually became moderate Muslim parties that now compete very successfully with Islamist parties for the middle-of-the-road Muslim’s vote.
We’ve developed a tendency to oversimplify the debate to one of Islam versus secularism, but most issues in the Muslim world implicate a whole host of other factors too. There are issues of security and stability, war and conflict, particularly in the Arab world and in the Middle East. There are issues about the size of the state. We often forget that the main problem of democracy in the Middle East today is overgrown, large states with enormous security capabilities. It is these police states that prevent, in most cases, the beginnings of democratic practice. Another important issue in the Muslim world is the size of the middle class. The Muslim world, particularly in the Middle East, has had a case of a shrinking middle class that is not tied into the global economy, that is not globalized, that is not operating or behaving or working in the same way as Latin American, Asian, Eastern European middle classes are working. And economic forces are not producing the kinds of social classes that would undergird the development of democracy.
Now there is a whole set of questions we need to think about and watch out for because they’ll influence how event will unfold in Muslim nations. One important point is that electoral repetition and practice matters. In other words, one vote, one time, is not going to suddenly create a new democracy. A population has to debate issues, get used to electoral practices, and go through continuous elections, the give-and-take of democracy, the political dealmaking, in order to become accustomed to the electoral process. That matters. In the last five years, we’ve expected democracy to be instituted after a country’s very first election, even in societies that have had very little or no previous experience with it. Rather than thinking that we’re going to get everything with the first shot, it’s more important to commit ourselves to making sure that democratic practice continues. For instance, we pushed Egypt and Saudi Arabia to hold elections. But now it’s important that they hold them again, so that elections aren’t just a one-time practice that goes away, never to return.
In the Arab world and in Iran, the state is just too large. It just controls too much of the economy and too much of the public sector. The state in these countries simply is not interacting with the global forces can really spur development. We forget that most developing states have been strengthened by the IMF and multinational corporations. Who asks and who really succeeds in changing laws in China? It’s not the State Department. It’s American business that’s forcing accountability and transparency on the Chinese system. I mean, if you have a state with the kinds of capabilities of the Egyptian state, I mean it’s foolhardy to be debating about whether Islam or democracy will succeed. Neither will. They’re going to have the same kind of authoritarian regime in place.
It’s important that instead of focusing on elections, we focus on the infrastructure of democracy: constitutions and constitutional compacts that really help civil society develop, not just in a superficial way by merely distributing money, but in a more fundamental way by creating space in which political and social organizations can thrive.
I think that in many ways, our commitment needs to be democracy in the long-run, not democracy as a short-term solution. I think, ultimately, democratization, political practice, and political pluralism will impact the way the people think about a variety of issues, including religion. And we can see that in countries where there has been continuous political practice, there is also religious and political debate as well.
Why don’t I stop here and I’d be happy to answer some questions you have or today or tomorrow during the sessions.
Question: If you were Secretary of Defense, what would you advise our President to do with regard to the frustrations we’re having in Iraq?
Answer: There’s no longer a silver bullet solution to Iraq. I think that we’ve got to begin by accepting that the surge has largely failed. Problem is that it hasn’t failed according to the way we’re currently gauging it. In other words, we ask commanders “Are you succeeding?,” and obviously the answer is going to be “Yes.” But the important thing is to ask is whether, in the eyes of the actual audience of the surge – the Iraqi people, has it succeeded or not. And I think that if the insurgents could attack the same shrine in June of 2007 that they attacked in February of 2006, we haven’t really made progress.
I think we have to accept that the surge has failed. And if a military solution has failed, you need to think of an end game in terms of the circumstance under which you would withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, at what pace, at what schedule, and what kind of minimal structures you envision for dealing with the mess or the problems that are going to be left behind. Some of these are serious questions. But I don’t think that we’re going to get to the necessary debate before we accept that the current strategy has run its course. There’s no point in waiting and trying to sort of find victory in this current strategy.
Question: A follow up to that: What advice would you give the President of the United States as it relates to the situation in Iran?
Answer: Well, again, you know, there are two separate issues with Iran. One is the nuclear issue which has, obviously, a much shorter timeline, at least based on the red line that we’ve drawn, which is that Iran should have no knowledge of enrichment, as opposed to whether they should have industrial capability or whether they should have capability to build the weapon which is a higher mark they would have to achieve. But that has a much shorter timeline. Dealing with the larger issue of how we should go about reigning in the Iranian power in the region that has been freed by the Iraq war will require a much longer-term approach to dealing with it.
I don’t think that there is any easy military option with Iran because, ultimately, it would entail starting a whole new war that we would then have to be able to continue. In other words, the United States has the perfect ability to start a war at this stage, but we don’t have the capability to end a war. In other words, you can strike Iran punitively to get their attention, but then, it’s up to the Iranians to escalate or not. And if they retaliate, and they’ve hinted very clearly that they will retaliate at a place and in a location of their own choosing, then the burden is on the United States to go to the next level. And ultimately, you would have to be in a position where you were able to put boots on the ground.
There’s no point in starting a whole new stage of conflict with Iran, unless we’re prepared to continue it. And I think, there’s no doubt, as one former Egyptian foreign minister said, the Iraq war opened the gates of hell in the Middle East and a war with Iran would push the Middle East through that gate. A war with Iran would be enormously destabilizing to the region. Even in terms of size, location, and strategic importance, you’re dealing with a country of 70 million people in a very pivotal location.
If the U.S. is so successful that it brings down the Iranian regime, who owns Iran after that? The idea that you’re going to have an immediate successor to the Iranian regime just isn’t true. And chaos and instability in Iran isn’t going to benefit the region either. I think, ultimately, we have serious issues with Iran and we have to figure out how to solve them. If a military option won’t solve the problem, we have to think of a better way of dealing with the problem that will ultimately include diplomatic engagement.
Question: If I understand you correctly, one of your major points is that the practice of democracy with a small “d” in a variety of countries around the world is likely to or promises to become part of the culture and the value system of the people in Muslim countries. How fragile or precarious a process is that? For example, we saw a lot of democracy in Latin America that was followed by some real backsliding. Now, that’s been turned around, but one knows that, given the history of Latin America, there’s a lot of fragility even in their present-day democracies. Do democratizing societies pose a risk to the rest of the world?
Answer: Definitely, but this democratic practice is already happening. There are certain things that we can look at, learn, and understand from what’s happening. So in some ways the debates about compatibility are important, but in some places, it’s already past that. Turkey is a good example of this. There, the issue is no longer compatibility, but efficacy.
Second, when you look at the diversity in the Muslim world, it’s not as dire as one thinks. In other words, there’s democratic practice happening. And sometimes it has positive ramifications and sometimes it has negative consequences.
Third, there is no one size that fits all. There are successes and failures and sometimes there are local reasons justify why these successes occur in some places and not in others. You could say that it’s historical; that it has to do with war and conflict; it has to do with economics; it has to do with homogeneity of the population or not; or it has to do with how powerful the state is. But all of these matter. Some of the dangers to these nations don’t come from Islam. Some do. Sometimes there is a danger that Islamists may still break out and overwhelm the democratic process.
But sometimes the danger actually comes from success. I mean, the Turkish military is saber rattling right now because the AKP party has been extremely successful. Pakistani General Musharraf staged a coup not because he was afraid of extremist jihadii forces -- those the government can always handle. Musharraf staged a coup because he was afraid that a moderate Muslim political party could actually dominate and that the military would lose its status in the political process.
So, yes, cases like Pakistan, like Bangladesh – Bangladesh fell prey to the collapse of its own social order and bickering – and Turkey . . . Turkey being probably the most successful case is in danger right now not from radical fundamentalists, it’s in danger from its secular military, which has a hard time tolerating even a moderate Muslim force in the political arena. In each of these cases, the solutions are different. In Turkey, you have a now-fading promise of membership in the European Union. The structure of the economy is very different and the Turkish middle class has changed significantly in recent years. But then we’ve got the Palestinian territories, which couldn’t be more different from Turkey.
So I think, in some ways, and even when we dealt with Latin America, we were aware of this. We were aware that Peru was not Argentina. That Argentina was a Europeanized, relatively developed society with a large, European-based middle class. That it had a kind of potential that maybe Peru or Bolivia did not have. And our policies tended to be nuanced towards these national differences.
It is time that we distinguish between different Muslim actors, different Islamic parties, different political arenas, and gauge how we can help the process depending on the reality on the ground.
Question: After having read your book “The Shia Revival,” and the discussion of differences between Iraqi President Maliki and Iraqi cleric Sistani, I concluded that Maliki [who is a Sunni] just doesn’t have any incentive to rule because the Shia are getting stronger and stronger as days go by. Where does this sectarian divide leave the United States?
Answer: Well that’s a different kind of problem. Politicians in ethnic societies like Iraq often behave in ways that maximize the size of their constituency and that maximize the reasons for their victory. They follow policies that aren’t necessarily bridge building. Bridge building only occurs if the rules of the game reward bridge building. Ultimately, we would like Maliki to reach out and arrive at an agreement that brings the Shia into the national fold, but now it’s no longer a democratically reconcilable dispute.
Ultimately, Miliki and the Shias will probably adopt the electoral strategy of the Kurds. The Kurds don’t get votes from other parties – they get votes from their own constituencies. They are, therefore, responsive primarily to their own constituencies, and they follow policies that try to expand the size of that constituency. The Sunnis and Shias will also try to compete for support from communities on the margins. But the rules of the electoral game in Iraq, reinforce sectarian tendencies because you need to emphasize your core constituency in order to score an electoral victory.
Question: Spin is now a major part of all political statements made by politicians and governments. Now that the U.S. has gotten a taste of how difficult it will be to jump-start a democracy in Iraq, do you this we’ll continue pushing it? Or will our government back off? And do American corporations really have any interest in there being a Middle Eastern democracy in Iraq?
Answer: The kinds of corporations that are in the Middle East don’t have any vested interest in democracy because, usually, corporations that are going in on the back of globalization tend to support the creation of more private sector space. That means that if production in Middle Eastern countries were to become part of the global economy, it would force the system open. There would be jobs created by the export sector. It would create relationships between foreign capitol and local businessmen that would force the system open.
But that’s not the case right now. Doing projects in countries with businessmen who are dependent on government contracts doesn’t translate into a vote for democracy. Many companies have done business in Saudi Arabia and now everybody’s in a rush to invest in Dubai, but not one of these companies is asking for democracy in Dubai because they have no vested interest in a democratic Dubai. It’s much easier to deal with one sheik, who signs all the transactional paperwork. The only time you’re going to have a corporate push for democratization is where you’ve got 200,000 workers stitching t-shirts for you, and you need to have certain laws, regulations, and political freedoms in order to satisfy your investors.
As far as the U.S. government’s concerned, we gave up on democracy in the Middle East a long time ago. I remember when Secretary of State Albright went to Cairo and delivered a famous speech that for 60 years, we invested in dictatorship in the hope of security and we didn’t get it. At that moment, the U.S. was helping a general in Pakistan dismantle democracy. This made it abundantly obvious that the Administration hadn’t really made the decision that when push came to shove, they were going to back democracy. The minute that security became an issue in a country that already had more democracy than most of the Arab world, the U.S. supported dismantling it. Similarly, the U.S. has now gone back to relying on Jordanian and Egyptian governments in the Arab world to handle Hamas, to help Mahmoud Abbas, to deal with refugees in Iraq, et cetera. The U.S. is still backing the same old Middle Eastern security states.
The U.S. is only interested in democracy in Iraq because it’s part of a whole different foreign policy agenda. But I think that Iraq and the U.S. push for democracy was so mishandled that now the gut reaction in our government is to try to go back to what we’re familiar with, which is the old Arab world. But I’m not sure it’s doable. I think that the assumption in Washington that you can just go back to 2002 as if all of these things in the Middle East – Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, unleashing of Iranian influence in the Persian Gulf – hadn’t happened, is a fallacy.
|
|
