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Sun. Jun 06, 2004

Middle East Futures

Last week, the opening paragraph of this story caught my eye: “Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Thursday scorned U.S. claims of promoting democracy in the Middle East, saying Iraq was a prime example of Washington’s failed policies in the region.”

It’s not surprising that Ayatollah Khamenei didn’t see it or say it, but in my opinion, it is Iran that is the prime example of Washington’s failed policies in the Middle East, not Iraq.

Iran was once ruled by the Shah, and throughout the 70’s, the US propped him up as his regime became increasingly repressive. When he faced dissent, we did not encourage him to open his government to allow popular participation. We helped him stonewall. We sold him arms, including our best jet fighters of that era. We brought him to America for medical care. The end result was an Islamic revolution, a hard swing of the pendulum rather than a moderated one, creating a “government” that also ignores the will of the Iranian people, to this day.

And that’s essentially the story of US policy in the Middle East from the 1960’s through 9/11/2001. We’ve had friendly dealings with almost all of the dictators and royal rulers of the Middle East. Many of them were corrupt oppressors, and none of them represented the will of their people. In a region in which there was one country with a free press, freedom of speech, equal rights, and a representative government (Israel), we saw no need to make a real push at promoting and spreading those American values … for decades. As a result, many of these countries have become oppressed breeding grounds for the terrorism we face today. Many of these governments retain power, in part, by deliberately turning their people’s anger away from themselves and towards us. Protest in the streets against the country’s leaders, and it will be busted up by the police, or worse. Protest against the Great Satan, and that night it will be on the government sponsored TV news.

It has been a spigot of nectar for Al Qaeda. And there’s really only one way to shut it off.

The people of the Middle East need to see that they can have a free press with hundreds of newspapers, freedom of speech and freedom to protest, and a representative government. They need to see that disparate ethnic groups can work together for the common good. All of these things are either happening, or beginning to happen in Iraq. Not Iran.

Oh, it’s been ugly. And it will continue to be, at times. But the people of the Middle East probably need to see that, too. Democracy is difficult. In Iraq, my belief is that we could/should have done a much better job of quickly establishing security and helping form a government, but the truth is that we won’t be there at all for any other nation in the Middle East that wants to take a path towards representative government.

Sure, in such a case, we could send some State Department types, and economic advisors, and maybe some cash. But we didn’t execute a real “Marshall Plan” for Iraq, when we’ve got nearly 140,000 troops there and a massive investment (in blood and capital). So we’re sure not going to do it for anybody else. That ought to be plain as day to anyone, leftist, rightist, or Islamist.

And that may be the thing that bothers me most about the situation we’ve created in Iraq. I haven’t fully put my finger on it (lack of time, and busy fingers), but there are two recent articles that come very close to doing it for me.

The first is from Daniel Drezner. Some excerpts:

Was the very idea of bringing democracy to Iraq ill-conceived, or did the problem lie in our implementation?

...a strong case can be made that the bulk of the blame lies with the implementation. As I argued repeatedly last year, the social science evidence suggests that democracy was not an unreasonable goal in Iraq. A necessary condition underlying that argument was that there was sufficient security…

Most voters don’t have time to reach sophisticated conclusions about the competence of the government’s post-war planning; they will therefore respond to our setbacks in Iraq by writing off the neocons’ big idea altogether, concluding that democracy promotion in the Middle East was a pipe dream. Without public support, the grand strategy of reforming the Middle East will inevitably fall by the wayside, no matter who wins the upcoming election.

If this is how events play out, the Bush administration will have left an ignoble mark on the history of U.S. foreign policy. Say what you will about the neoconservatives’ skills at manners or management; their big idea cannot be dismissed lightly. There is a compelling logic to the argument that the primary source of frustration among Arabs in the Middle East is a sense of powerlessness. Trapped in a region littered with authoritarian and corrupt regimes, they are encouraged by these regimes and their Islamic critics to blame their situation on Israel and the United States. This is an ideal environment for fomenting terrorism. Creating an open society in Iraq would put the lie to this kind of hate-mongering.

The craft of foreign policy is choosing wisely from a set of imperfect options. While flawed, the neoconservative plan of democracy promotion in the Middle East remains preferable to any known alternatives. Of course, such a risky strategy places great demands on execution, and so far this administration has executed poorly. It would be a cruel irony if, in the end, the biggest proponents of ambitious reform in the Middle East are responsible for unfairly discrediting their own idea.

New Republic: “Fail Proof”

And don’t miss Daniel’s link filled bibliography. The other article is by Fouad Ajami, professor of Middle Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University, and has the ominous title “Iraq May Survive, but the Dream Is Dead.”

Let’s face it: Iraq is not going to be America’s showcase in the Arab-Muslim world. The president’s insistence that he had sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, “not to make them American” is now — painfully — beside the point. The unspoken message of the speech was that no great American project is being hatched in Iraq. If some of the war’s planners had thought that Iraq would be an ideal base for American primacy in the Persian Gulf, a beacon from which to spread democracy and reason throughout the Arab world, that notion has clearly been set aside.

Back in the time of our triumph — that of swift movement and of pulling down the dictator’s statues — we had let the victory speak for itself. There was no need to even threaten the Syrians, the Iranians and the Libyans with a fate similar to the one that befell the Iraqi despotism. Some of that deterrent power no doubt still holds. But our enemies have taken our measure; they have taken stock of our national discord over the war. We shall not chase the Syrian dictator to a spider hole, nor will we sack the Iranian theocracy.

NY Times: “Iraq May Survive, but the Dream Is Dead”

Never mind any “chasing” or “sacking,” there is great doubt that we’ve done anything to inspire the people of Syria or Iran to rise up and take control of their government. We certainly haven’t done as much as we could have. Not at this point, a full 14 months after toppling Saddam.

We created a rare strategic opportunity. Yet we weren’t fully tactically prepared to “grab” it. The commitment wasn’t there to execute it, fully and properly, from the first day of looting on. Oh, sure, Iraq is much better off than it was under Saddam, and it will eventually recover from these many months of violence. And it will eventually build its own unique form of representative government, one that may eventually inspire its neighbors to emulate it.

But it didn’t have to be this way. No one promised a rose garden, but we shouldn’t have ended up covered in this much self-inflicted dung, either. And the fact that we have harms our future hopes.