[Peace-discuss] The Democracy Lie

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The proprietor of the important blog "Informed Comment" offers a
judicious weighing of the latest propaganda line from the USG about why
killing 100,000 Arabs was a Good Idea.  --CGE]

	http://www.alternet.org/story/21540/
	Posted on March 19, 2005
	TomPaine.com
	[originally posted to Salon on March 16, 2005]
	The Democracy Lie
	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 Qaeda--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 Qaeda 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.

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.