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| A young Iraqi boy waves the national flag at a polling station on election day in Baghdad January 30, 2005. Iraq has been sovereign for over a year (Reuters photo). |
An ideological struggle of momentous proportions, one likely to shape world affairs for centuries to come, presently convulses parts of the Middle East. Paradoxically, both parties to that struggle respond to the same challenge: problems left in the wake of Islamic civilization’s five-hundred-year decline relative to the emergence of Europe and Western societies that have built on its modern legacy. One party to the contest, as explained by Bernard Lewis in his Crisis of Islam, has resumed “the struggle for religious dominance of the world that began in the seventh century.” The other seeks to uplift the Middle East economically and politically, enabling it to achieve a place of honor within the 21st-century world.
Islamic civilization has, indeed, experienced a humiliating decline from its former heights of power and accomplishment. In What Went Wrong?, Lewis succinctly described that decline’s consequences: “In the course of the twentieth century it became abundantly clear … [that] the world of Islam had become poor, weak, and ignorant.” Islam’s response to Western progress created “a string of shabby tyrannies, ranging from traditional autocracies to new-style dictatorships, modern only in their apparatus of repression and indoctrination.”
Arabs are acutely aware that Islam was not always backward. During its first century, Muhammad and his followers overran the Persian Empire, drove the Christian Byzantine Empire from the Eastern Mediterranean to refuge on the Anatolian Peninsula, and occupied North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. Recovering from both the Crusades and several waves of Asian invaders, Islam—then led by the Turks—completed the destruction of Byzantium and occupied the Balkans.
| For a culture built in part on avoidance of shame, Islamic civilization’s present low state is humiliating in the extreme. |
During Islam’s first millennium, it had no enduring military and political rivals, but that was not its only achievement. As a commercial power it had no medieval peer, and only China could make a comparable claim to global intellectual leadership. In addition to excelling in arts and literature, Muslim scholars preserved the wisdom of Greece, drew upon the learning of Persia and India, and contributed importantly to mathematics and science.
Muslims rightly considered Islam the world’s leading civilization, indeed civilization itself. Even so, Europe’s Renaissance and its revolutions in religion and science, and the emergence of the modern state in the West gradually challenged Islamic leadership. The Ottoman Empire steadily declined until shattered by Europe at the end of World War I. For a culture built in part on avoidance of shame, that collapse and Islamic civilization’s present low state are humiliating in the extreme, a source of embarrassment that cries out for correction.
Following lines of thought that arose in Egypt and have been promulgated by Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabis, one party to the present struggle—the Islamists—has traced Islam’s collapse to an alleged loss of the true, seventh-century faith. They seek to drive Western influence out of the Middle East, overthrow the region’s present “apostate” rulers, and create a new theocratic Islamic empire centered in the Middle East but soon stretching from Morocco to Indonesia. Striving to replicate their vision of seventh-century Islamic society, the Islamists would govern that new empire much as the Taliban once ruled Afghanistan.
With the Middle East and its oil securely in their hands, the Islamists could abandon the use of terrorism, with which they now seek to gain control, and employ their newly acquired wealth and global influence to overcome Europe and then the United States. In recent times only Hitler, Tojo, Lenin, and Stalin have had similar unlimited dreams of world conquest.
The other contender in the struggle to shape the Middle East’s future has no such grandiose aims, even if it does face a difficult challenge. It seeks to end tyranny, oppression, ignorance, and appalling poverty. It would do so by bringing modern popular government and economic development to the region—governments founded on constitutions that impose legislative and judicial checks on executive power, safeguard civil rights and liberties, establish the rule of law, and guarantee each citizen’s equality before the law.
In Afghanistan, a Muslim though not an Arab country, the first steps in that process are well along. Afghans now have a constitution and a popularly elected president and legislature. The process of modernization in Iraq began later, but that country has now been sovereign for over a year. It has a popularly elected provisional legislature, which has written a constitution recently submitted to the voters. Election of a permanent national government should occur in December. In both countries, Islamists continue their wanton murder of civilians in an effort to weaken their emerging governments and cow those Western states supporting the struggle to modernize.
| With the Mideast and its oil in their hands, the Islamists could abandon the use of terrorism, with which they now seek to gain control. |
Though the Islamists continue the attack on those who do not share their views, the cause of those who seek to move the Middle East into the modern world will be immeasurably aided if the region’s governments reject Islamism and terror, initiate reforms not unlike those seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, and lay the foundation for popular government, education of all children, and economic progress. If that process gets underway, it is the Islamists who may lose heart and stop murdering fellow Muslims. That is why democratic reform is so vitally important. As President George Bush explained in his recent speech at the National Endowment for Democracy, “In this new century, freedom is once again assaulted by enemies. … Once again, we’re responding to a global campaign of fear with a global campaign of freedom. And once again, we will see freedom’s victory.”
This brings us to the central question: Is American policy promoting democratic reform in the Middle East? Our answer to this question is a resounding yes. We believe the success of that policy will become increasingly apparent as the months and years go by. Before going into details, however, there are subsidiary questions to be resolved.
First, a number of writers on the Middle East have opined that the region’s awakening democratic movement will not benefit American interests because, they assume, popularly elected government will be more adverse to US policies because of the Arab population’s current anti-American attitudes. Even if one assumes this is true (we do not), it bears no relevance to the question. The issue is not what is best for US interests but what promotes the emergence of a democratic society.
A second argument often heard is that this democratic movement will engender more violence, a case in point being Iraq. The road to democracy is rarely painless and very often accompanied by violence as those who stand to lose power and privilege forcibly resist or as those wishing to push developments in other directions turn to violence, as Baath Party mandarins and Islamist terrorists are now trying to do in Iraq. Again this is peripheral to the central question.
The Middle East of 2001 was a place of political and economic stagnation, ruled by aging authoritarian rulers maintained in power by intelligence and security forces, often of the same ethnic background as the rulers. Its people were mere political spectators kept down by divide-and-rule policies, intimidation, and the old adage that a thousand years of tyranny is better than one day of chaos. It was this doctrine that kept despots such as Saddam Hussein and Hafez Assad in power.
As so often happens, a massive military intervention broke the logjam. Wars, as horrible as they are, often bring sweeping changes in society, as happened to Japan and Germany after World War II. The defeat of Afghanistan’s sociopathic ideologues, who waved the banner of political Islam to justify their totalitarian rule, exposed them as an empty shell. The intervention of the Coalition in Iraq provided another example of the dichotomy of despotic Middle Eastern rulers—brutal and cruel to their own people but hapless in defense of their nation. Another example of military collapse is the Republican Guard’s shameful 1991 flight toward Baghdad, laden with Kuwaiti booty. It abandoned regular Iraqi troops in Kuwait in order to protect Saddam. The total collapse of Iraq’s conventional forces in 2003 provides further evidence on that point. The reason is very simple: For despots, only survival of their regime matters; they care nothing for their country or people.
| 2001’s Mideast was a place of political and economic stagnation, ruled by authoritarian rulers maintained in power by intelligence and security forces . |
It cannot simply be happenstance that following the second Gulf War, democratic movements began blossoming in every corner of the Middle East. Understandably, the regimes in power reacted in different ways. Some, such as Iran’s theocrats, played to the disenfranchised mobs and reinforced the power of the forces of coercion in order to intimidate the liberal movement. The Iranian democratic movement has been temporarily arrested, but in the middle term, the regime will find it increasingly difficult to put the genie of democracy back in the bottle. As so graphically and beautifully depicted in Reading Lolita in Teheran, the desire for freedom is universal and only needs a voice and an example. The elections in Iraq have offered that. Despite present reliance on senseless violence against innocents to re-impose the rule of a privileged minority, freedom will eventually prevail.
Some, and this is the majority of rulers, have attempted the age-old policy of co-option—throwing out tidbits of social reform while trying very hard to stop any meaningful political progress. This too will fail because autocrats find it difficult to dispense with institutions of social and political reform once they are in place. The façade eventually becomes the reality.
Looking around the Middle East we see the embryonic beginnings of a truly democratic process. It is spurred on and freedom’s momentum maintained by repeated and gentle US pushing of its allies and more assertive pressure on its enemies.
In Jordan, the leadership has adopted a substantial set of national reforms, especially in economic, legal, and administrative matters, and has embarked on a significant democratization process, particularly when viewed in the regional context.
The Lebanese made it clear that the corrupt and brutal regime of the Assad Dynasty was no longer welcome in their country, and under international, especially American, diplomatic pressure, the Syrians withdrew their military forces. It is well known, of course, that the ubiquitous Syrian intelligence and security services are still in the business of killing and maiming those who promote democracy. They too will ultimately be forced out. Even Walid Jumblatt, the Lebanese Druze leader, has conceded that his criticism of the US policy was misplaced. Though he found it “strange” to acknowledge, he credited the American invasion of Iraq with stimulating the Lebanese desire for freedom. “I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.”
In the same vein, a Kuwaiti merchant told Fouad Ajami, “George W. Bush has unleashed a tsunami on the region.” In parts of the Arabian Peninsula, women for the first time are allowed to vote and run for office; in Jordan a new report will initiate a 10-year program of political liberalization; in Lebanon local security services are being revamped with judges and military officers given responsibility for overseeing their activities; in Palestine the third round of municipal elections is underway. Despite gloomy forecasts, Hamas was the clear winner in only 13 of 104 municipalities.
In a region where liberal reformers could once almost literally meet in a phone booth, and despite a determined rear-guard action by apparatchiks and traditional elites, democracy is taking hold and the beginnings of a new day in Middle East politics have appeared.
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