[lbo-talk] Juan Cole: The Democracy Lie

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Mon Mar 21 07:44:57 PST 2005


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.



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