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The Region: Democracy promotion in the Middle East: Good idea, wrong place and time
BARRY RUBIN
Democracy is a great idea; open elections are ideally the best way to choose governments; dialogue with everyone is wonderful in theory. But in the Middle East, unfortunately, as a policy this would be a disaster.
That's because we're confusing the mechanics of democracy with the thing itself, form versus substance. There's no reason an oligarchy or even a dictatorship can't be as "democratic" as a democracy. The fact is that they seldom are -- but the fact is also that true "democracies" have occasionally grown out of them, just as they usually deteriorate into them.
It is not Western policy but local conditions which are going to determine whether there will be democracy in the Arabic-speaking world. In my book, The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), I analyze both the debate and the existing groups. The assessment must be pessimistic.
I haven't read the book, but I'm also pessimistic. We've seen in the past seven years the Orange and Rose and Cedar and several other promising "revolutions," none of which has lived up to expectations and most of which are now either on the way to oblivion or already there.
The Cedar Revolution failed because outsiders (Assad, the Mad Mullahs and Nasrallah) stepped on it hard. The Orange revolution failed because outsiders (Putin) need it to fail. The Rose revolution is on life support because outsiders (Putin again) need it to fail.

There's a theme here. Revolutions that overthrow tyranny can (maybe) work, but never if powerful outsiders can come in and crush them before the new society has organized itself. The American revolution worked because it was left alone after the British quit. Imagine if the French had come in to disrupt us.
Would we like to see liberal democracy and moderation prevail with rising living standards and more freedom? Of course, but the real question is what effect certain policies would have.
I think the real question is whether the essentials are in place, first, for the demos to make its voice the will of the state, and second for moderation to prevail and living standards to rise. In actual fact, the second depends on the first, not the other way around. We've been going about it from the wrong direction.
The Western debate gets stranger and stranger. Among the policymaking classes, there's a prevailing view that the Bush administration was a disaster.
Idealism often leads to disaster, though in this case Bush gets the usual bad rap.
The rather misleading description for those who advocated a US policy of promoting democracy and overthrowing dictators - "neo-conservative" - has become among such people a curse word implying stupid and evil.
Stupid and evil for attempting to extend to people who've never known it the same rights we enjoy here and which Europe emulates with similar (but not identical) systems.
Why, then, does the debate seem to be between those who now run most Western governments and want to engage with the worst, most dangerous extremists and those who want to promote democracy by opening up the political process to the... worst, most dangerous extremists?
Probably because that's all that's left -- except for Iraq, of course. We built that, however, imperfectly. There's no telling what the future holds, but it doesn't look at this moment like they're on their way down the path of dynastic politix and they've had enough sectarian politix to realize why avoiding them might be advantageous. Up close and personal Iraqi democracy looks more like the sort of patron-client system that's been the hallmark of the mafia here, but so do the ward heeler politix that represent the norm in Chicago and Noo Yawk.
WHATEVER BECAME of good old-fashioned realism, the breakfast of champions in diplomacy for centuries? Realism, a term that has been hijacked lately far more than Islam, means to base a policy on the actually existing situation rather than one's wish-list, building alliances on the basis of common interests. It does not mean embracing your worst enemies while kicking those with common interests in the groin. Nor does it mean acting like the nerdy kid groveling in the hope that it will make the popular guys like him. And it also doesn't mean ignoring adversaries' ideologies and goals.
I always feel the urge to cringe when I run into "realists" of the sort Barry's discussing. Henry Kissinger is only the largest lately of a long string of exemplars going back thousands of years. Macchiavelli discussed how to be one. Some are actually pretty good at it -- Henry sold out the Vietnamese at the top of the demand crest and won accolades, except from the boat people. Zbigniew Brzezinski as supposed to do the same thing for Carter, and that gave the world the Iranian ayatollahs. Remember, it was the "realists" who sold the Shah down the river. I think "realism" is mostly driven by short-term viewpoints and paths of least resistance, rather than by long-term strategy. That's why "idealists" usually end up standing the "realists" up against a wall and shooting them.
Realists believe that advancing the narrow interests of their own country is what counts. That's why Kissinger succeeded: his job was to get us out of Vietnam and he did. An idealist would have said, fix the stupidities that were hampering us there and stay the course, because a free South Vietnam was worth it long term. Realists advanced the idea of working with Middle East despots to keep the oil flowing, and to this day can't admit that it was that policy that helped radicalize the people who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center. Dubya, for all his faults, understood that idealism, pragmatically run, was the best long-term strategy.
Is it really so hard to understand that US policy should be based on working closely with Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Iraq, Lebanon (moderates, not Iranian-Syrian agents), Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf emirates?
  • Morocco: a monarchy with a pragmatically authoritarian bent, working diligently to keep its Islamists under control;

  • Tunisia: an actively non-Islamist authoritarian state;

  • Algeria: grandchild of the FLN, graveyard of the GIA, working to stamp out al-Qaeda in North Africa while keeping FIS and similar Muslim Brotherhood Islamists at arms' length with Bouteflika essentially as president-for-life;

  • Egypt: Home of the Muslim Brotherhood, oppressor of the Copts, a hereditary authoritarian presidency for life;

  • Jordan: Maintaining the trappings of a functioning democracy while keeping Syria from treating it like Lebanon, Israel from kicking its hindquarters in the next war, and its Paleostinian citizenry from setting off that war;

  • Israel: I always think of them as Greece with a problem. If they didn't have the Muslim world wanting to throw them into the sea they wouldn't like us all that much because we're not Social Democrats;

  • Iraq: We built them. At the moment they're doing pretty well, but there's nothing to say they'll continue doing well. They're been priest-ridden for 5000 years, so it's not likely there're going to stop real soon.

  • Lebanon (moderates, especially, but also the Iranian-Syrian agents) barely even maintains the fiction of being a "democracy." They're an oligarchy and their internal politix would make Alexius Comnenus dizzy. Average life of a deal in Leb is probably about 30 minutes, and all Leb politicians with the possible exception of Nasrallah have been on all sides of every issue at least four times.

  • Saudi Arabia: the original autocratic tribal kingdom, primitives with a veneer of wealth. They chop people's heads off, but at least they reserve that right to the state. They've got at least one tribe where you can grow old and die without ever once seeing your mother's face. They're the source of virtually all the money funding all the Sunni terrorism worldwide.

  • Gulf emirates: Probably the most "realist" of the lot. The solution to the war on terror lies with reaching deals with the Gulf Arabs' kingpins -- and holding them to the deals.

Is it really so hard to understand that US policy should also be based on combating Iran, Syria, Sudan, Hizbullah, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhoods, as well as al-Qaida?
To me and to Barry (Rubin, not Obama) that's clear as glass, though he forgot to include Pakistain on his list. But combating them requires the expenditure of blood and treasure, and the blood's politically risky and the treasure's there to be shared with one's supporters, not wasted on some foreign adventure. That's the realism behind that "realism."
We saw what happened in Iran after experts predicted in 1978 that anything would be better than the shah and that moderates would inevitably prevail.
Kerensky was gonna be better than the Tsar and his corrupt court, too.
We saw what happened with the Palestinian elections, for while Fatah was no prize, Hamas is far worse and eager for bloodshed.
We actually forget what happened in the Paleostinian elections: Fatah, recall, split into "old guard" and "young guard" factions, fighting over the boodle. At one point a considerable faction of them was going to boycott the election, which represents a simply brilliant way to not get elected.
We are about to see what will happen with Lebanese elections which are nominally democratic
... but actually oligarchic ...
but influenced by Iranian-Syrian money and intimidation, as a government emerges likely to lead Lebanon into the Iranian bloc.
That's a distinct possibility, and it was a fair masterly manipulation that set that up. Israel represents the Lebs' natural ally, but the Medes and the Persians and their puppets made sure that didn't happen by starting a war when things looked like they might get out of hand after they killed Hariri. How much was pre-planned and how much was siezing the opportunities as they presented themselves, I don't know. I consulted the ghost of Alexius Comnenus and he said he'd get back to me.
In Turkey, the several-times-elected AK regime, although still presented internationally as a model moderate Muslim government, is engaged in systematically Islamizing institutions and taking the country down a road leading closer to Teheran than to Washington.
The while the EU watches to make sure the Turkish army doesn't stop the process -- which surely includes infiltrating the army.
I DO NOT LIKE saying this because I know many courageous liberal dissidents and would like them to win. US and Western policy should always press for their rights, against their imprisonment. But why should the United States pursue a policy that we have every reason to believe will be catastrophic: namely, pushing for a situation in which radical Islamists are more likely to take over.
By following the path of least resistance. There's a reason the opposing bad guyz call themselves "the Resistance™."
Examples have been given of people who might be expected to be liberal preferring to back Islamist parties. But Egypt is virtually the only place this seems to be happening.
To the average Egyptian intellect the Muslim Brotherhood is probably transiently preferable to a continuation of dynastic autocracy. Hitler's stability was transiently preferable to the chaos and hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic. And Kerensky was transiently preferable to the corruption and ineptitude of the Tsar and his court and their involvement in the War to End All Wars.
Elsewhere, people who might be expected to be liberal are supporting the existing regimes out of fear of Islamists. I think that Egypt is a misleading case for that reason. And in Egypt, the leading "liberal" group has now been taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood and spouts a very radical anti-American line.
As does the left in Israel. Being "pro-American" means standing for a lot of things that are hard to put into a one line slogan and disbelieving in a lot of things that seem like they should work. It means standing for a lot of things that are at variance with what "liberals" (in the wider sense) regard as good. A functioning democracy depends on the rights of the individual:
  • the right to own property and pass it on to his or her heirs at least relatively intact;

  • the right to say what he or she pleases, whether it hurts someone else's feelings or not -- keeping in mind that the someone else has the right to respond it kind without the discussion resulting in firearms;

  • the right to think, to whit, the right to believe in any religion he, she or it may please to believe it, and to change his/her/its mind at any point, to become a Rosicrucian, a Jew, a Baha'i, an agnostic, or a devotee of the Risen Elvis;
Everything else depends on those three things, and all other rights -- for instance the right to bear arms or the right to a free press -- exist to protect or exemplify those three.
  • If your property's not secure then you become property;

  • if you can't speak, then it doesn't matter what you think;

  • and if you can't think then you're just as much a piece of property as any other slave.
Liberalism in its social democratic guise believes property should be shared in the name of economic justice; they believe in free speech but not in the freedom to be offensive; and they're willing to accomodate people who take their religion seriously enough to kill people for it, since they don't take their own that seriously and there's kind of a personal danger if you cross those bastards. The difference between Americanism and the rest of the world is where the rights accrue, and it's here that the difference between the American approach and the social democratic approach is most vivid.
Do we really want to contribute to subverting the Egyptian regime, with all its faults, and making the Brotherhood more powerful? The reaction is arrogance on the part of the radicals and despair among the moderates.
I'd rather subvert the regime by seeing all references to religion removed, even made illegal, to seeing property rights enshrined, and by seeing the average Egyptian just as free to do as he damned well pleases as anybody in Hoboken or Abuquerque.
The liberals conclude, you hear this all the time in Turkey, that America wants the Islamists to win.
I'd rather see the Turks reveling in their freedom, rather than scheming to take each other's freedoms away.
I don't prefer this situation. I don't like it. But in a world where Islamists seek to overthrow nationalists, in which an Iranian-Syrian led alliance is trying to gain hegemony in much of the region, I feel that Western policy needs to back the regimes against the revolutionaries.
I agree, but I also demand that we push our principles as well.
There are some ethnic or religious communities which have an interest in supporting a moderate democratic approach. At present, this includes Iraqi Kurds and Shi'ites; Lebanese Sunni Arabs, Christians and Druse; and the Berbers of the Maghreb. These are, however, special cases.
Namely those are the people who're being most oppressed at the moment. They can stand up for themselves, individually and as groups, or they can go the way of the Gepids.
There are also very systematic campaigns to fool well-intentioned, gullible Westerners. These are often carried out by having moderate statements in English directed to a foreign audience and revolutionary extremist ones in Arabic directed at one's own society. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has created a very nicely done English-language Web site that would make it seem the organization is something between the Democratic Party and the March of Dimes.
Bringing us back to the principle of "watch the hands, not the lips."
If the West engages with Hamas, Hizbullah and the Muslim Brotherhoods, while working to create a situation in which these groups can compete for power more effectively, the results will be disastrous both for the West and for the Arabs who become victims of the resulting Islamist regimes. No argument, no matter how sincerely heartfelt or superficially clever, alters that fact. That is a tragedy, but in policy terms it is also a necessity to deal with the reality of Middle East polities and societies.
Posted by: Fred 2009-03-22
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=265700