Point/Counterpoint
Is US Policy Igniting Mideast Reform?

The Moral Failure of Arab Intellectuals *

This is yet another debate sponsored by IslamOnline.net’s Muslim Affairs section over the US role in Mideast change. Retired US Army colonel James L. Abrahamson and Egyptian international relations researcher Kareem M. Kamel disagree on whether the US policy has been promoting political reform in the Middle East.

You, too, can take part in our debate. Talk to Abrahamson and Kamel in a Live Dialogue session Tuesday, November 15 or e-mail us your questions ahead of time: Mideast@islamonline.net.

“We here in Iraq have now ... legitimate elections.”

In Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World, Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya wrote a devastating critique of the “moral failure” of Arab “intellectuals” who pandered to tyrants like Saddam Hussein and Hafez Assad, ignoring or rationalizing the wholesale slaughter of the Kurds and Shiites in Iraq and all the residents of Hamah and Allepo in Syria. While these monumental acts of barbarity were being carried out, those intellectuals were expressing the same tired old clichés about colonialism and imperialism—the opiates of the Arab people. Those self-proclaimed spokesmen deliberately obfuscated the real barriers to an Arab world in which the educated did not flee to the West in order to provide a decent life for their families.

Kareem Kamel, an Egyptian doctoral student, denigrates from afar Iraq’s new government and its two free and fair elections this year, but here are the better-informed views—reprinted just as she wrote them—of an Iraqi journalist, a friend of one of the authors of this rebuttal who has read our affirmative statement of the case: 

What you mentioned about the positive changes that sometimes only war can bring into Mideast countries is true. In a country like mine, there was no way to convince the previous regime of making democratic changes except by power. I guess that the surrounding countries are afraid that the wind of changes that started from Iraq after the liberation will carry them the same changes. It will motivate the people in those countries to take action and rise up against their brutal regimes and governments. That’s why those rulers criticize constantly the political process in Iraq and moreover they try hard to put sticks in the wheels. Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and even Jordan seek to hinder the dramatic and positive changes that are taking place in Iraq. They question the credibility of the elections and the referendum and come up with all those lousy accusations about the US policy in Iraq because they want to prove to their people that the war has only torn the unity of Iraq and spread nothing but chaos.

But look to the positive side and you can see that we here in Iraq have now a permanent constitution, legitimate elections, civil society, freedom of speech. Yes we have also violence, terrorists, but as you said, the price of freedom is high. Nothing comes easily, as everyone knows. I believe that in a couple of years, the army and other security forces will get stronger, and when that happens, Iraq will be a model of democracy for the whole region.

Those observations by an Iraqi journalist reveal two things: how wrong Kamel is about Mideast political reform and the extent to which his presentation—a mass of falsehood and misrepresentations that it would take a dozen pages to expose—has wandered from the proper topic of this debate.

Rather than address the issue, Kamel exaggerates the numbers of foreign troops in Iraq, foolishly claims that Iraq’s Shiites and Kurds regarded Baathist rule as “legitimate,” ignores the Islamist terrorists’ indiscriminant murder of Shiites (even in places of worship), demonstrates his ignorance of vast post-invasion improvements in Iraq’s health and education systems—and infrastructure in general. He slanders the United States when he describes its motives as imperial and claims that it is “fighting Islam worldwide.” It is, in fact, the Islamist terrorists who wish to establish a Mideast imperial domain, a caliphate imposing a Taliban-style tyranny on the entire region in pursuit of schemes for world conquest and global religious domination. Kamel writes as another Sunni apologist for Islamist terror and Mideast autocrats. It almost seems that he believes the Lebanese were better served by Syrian exploitation than by their oppressor’s forced withdrawal and their newly elected government. Nor would a reader realize that the Lebanese tension he laments is traceable to armed Palestinian and Hizbullah terrorists who reject popular government.

Will Mideast democracy emerge full-grown next year? No. Even a superpower cannot simultaneously do every needful thing everywhere it needs doing. Nor can a superpower achieve its Mideast aims single-handedly. It can do little more than support the Muslims’ own efforts. The essence of strategy is concentration of effort. For the United States this has meant active—and successful—promotion of political reform among the peoples of two willing nations—Afghanistan and Iraq. In an effort likely lasting decades, the United States elsewhere brings diplomatic pressure to bear on its enemies and gently prods its allies to do better, as it did when Mubarak released from jail a likely presidential opponent. Democratic progress often works like a ratchet. Each step forward may be small, but once made it cannot be reversed.

In assessing the progress of political reform in the Mideast, we ask IslamOnline.net’s readers to remember some undoubted truths. In free and fair elections, Iraqis have elected a transitional legislature, which formed a ministry and approved a constitution to which 79 percent of Iraqis gave their assent. Elections of a permanent government are now set for mid-December. Only the violence of a power-hungry minority impedes that undoubted progress and slows Iraq’s reconstruction. Iraq’s success is nevertheless being closely followed in the Mideast. It has already contributed to self-government in Lebanon and smaller changes elsewhere, which will likely lead toward a greater public role in governance throughout the region.

Will that occur quickly? Probably not. Is popular government, however slowly achieved, not more desirable than an Islamist caliphate? Only an Islamist would think not. It is long past time for Arab elites to begin condemning the Islamist terrorists and praising Iraqis for what they are contributing to: a better future for all the Mideast.

* Abu Haqiiqah Ibn Armand contributed to this article. Abu Haqiiqah Ibn Armand is presently a US Government instructor engaged in the education of government personnel. He is a graduate of the US Military Academy and holds an MA in Arab Studies from The American University of Beirut. He served for a number of years in the Middle East as an instructor, army officer, and corporate staff member.

James L. Abrahamson is a retired US Army colonel and a graduate of the US Military Academy West Point. He holds advanced degrees in international relations and history from the University of Geneva’s Graduate School of International Studies (MA) and Stanford University (PhD). During the last half of his 27 years of military service, he taught at the US Military Academy and the US Army War College. At present he is on the board of and writes for the Internet journal American Diplomacy.