Sunday, March 06, 2005
In Iraq, two forces - modernizing and reactionary - are trying to benefit from the collapse of the old order. The same dynamic is at work throughout the Middle East.
March 6, 2005 What's in It for America? By ROGER COHEN
IN the Middle East, an old order is weakening - that of authoritarian, repressive states walled off from modernity. A new order is rising, with democracy stirring in countries from Iraq to Egypt, mass demonstrations pushing out Syrian troops from Lebanon and a Palestinian leader apparently committing himself to an open political system. But will this emergent democratic current, if consolidated, make America safer? President George W. Bush has argued that America's ideals are now synonymous with its interests; the spread of freedom will drain the frustration and rage on which terrorism feeds. The argument is beautiful in its simplicity. But it is precisely in democratic Europe that Mohammed Atta, a mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, lived for about a decade, and it is from Britain, scarcely a stranger to liberty, that Richard Reid, the would-be shoe bomber of American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami, hailed. Democracy can open the way for many things including illiberal opinion. Turkey, long a pliant ally under military or military-backed rule, has proved more restive under the government of a democratically elected moderate Islamic party, forcing the United States to revise its Iraq invasion plans by denying access to American troops. A fully democratic and independent Lebanon would presumably reflect the fact that many Lebanese think Hezbollah, viewed as a terrorist organization in Washington but not in Paris, is a force for good, helping the needy and resisting Israel. For a long time, American policy toward the Middle East was guided precisely by such fears: democracy could be, and likely would be, dangerous. A blind eye was turned to authoritarianism because it kept the shop in order, quieted the Arab street and served American interests. But then the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, showed how treacherous the status quo could be. "The traditional United States approach for the past half-century ignored what went on inside Middle Eastern societies so long as they cooperated on energy, security and diplomacy," said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. "The president has now rejected that. The question is: can he deliver an orderly transition?" That question will likely not be answered for several years. But what is clear already is that a region long marked by inertia is in flux. Events from Saudi Arabia to Syria suggest that the invasion of Iraq and the election there have indeed had a catalytic effect, opening up debate, tearing down walls. Democracy is getting a toehold. But terrorism remains a mystery. Nobody knows exactly what leads a young Muslim to blow himself up in the name of a holy war against the West. As Walter Laqueur, the historian specializing in political violence, has observed, "There can be no final victory in the fight against terrorism, for terrorism (rather than full-scale war) is the contemporary manifestation of conflict, and conflict will not disappear from earth." In other words, democracy is no panacea, but nor is anything else. Terrorism will not crumble like Communism or Fascism, defeated by containment or force of arms or economic measures or the ballot box. Indeed, it is possible the greater proximity of Western ideas and practices may only redouble the jihadist urge, which has been driven in part by the desire to re-create an infidel-free caliphate. But it is also possible that a more open system may cool apocalyptic urges in the Middle East as it has elsewhere. "Democratic governments in the Middle East are going to be much more difficult for the United States to handle because there will be more direct expression of sentiment, much of it hostile," said Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Columbia University. "But in the end it will be healthier and, yes, democracy could provide an outlet for the frustration that drives people to jihadism." For many years, Islamism seemed the only such outlet. In varying degrees, the Iranian revolution, jihadist successes in Afghanistan, and the anti-Western teachings of men like the executed Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb contributed to this vogue. So, too, did the hypocrisy of the West in making it clear that democracy was not for countries like Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Algeria, where a democratic election that seemed about to usher Islamists to power was quashed in 1991. But in both the West and the Middle East, the currents that produced this drift seem to be ebbing. The Algerian experience was scarcely edifying; it ushered in a period of terrible conflict. Turkey may be harder to handle as a democracy, but it has scarcely ceased to be an ally. The Bush administration has concluded that Middle Eastern democracy is preferable, however uncomfortable it may prove. Among Muslims, too, the forces prodding a rethinking are significant. The Afghan model for a fundamentalist Islamic society has been demolished. The fervor of the Iranian revolution has faded. The invasion of Iraq has brought into the Arab heartland a model - still fragile and bitterly contested - of a liberal and democratic society. Democracy is no longer an abstraction, a risible plaything selectively dangled by Western powers with interests more compelling than ideals. It is right there, on the doorstep, or on the screen in the living room. "The discourse is changing in the Arab world," said Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "If you want to adopt a radical cause, Islamism is no longer the only answer. You can go join those 500 demonstrators for democracy surrounded by 3,000 police in the streets of Cairo." Of course, if you're angry enough, you can also blow up kids at a Tel Aviv discothèque, or drive an explosives-laden car into police recruits in Iraq, or kill a judge preparing to conduct the trials of Saddam Hussein's henchmen. There are plenty of Arabs still ready to do this in the service of plenty of causes: fanatical Islamic fundamentalism, anti-imperial nationalism, anti-Zionism or simply the defense of threatened privilege. The argument that the American invasion of Iraq has boosted recruitment for Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups, increased Muslim hatred of the West, injected a dangerous instability into a turbulent region, and given suicide bombers new cause for their zeal cannot be ignored. The push for democracy through force or arms and unbending rhetoric may only have increased the danger, at least in the short term. "The barrier of fear is beginning to break," said Murhaf Jouejati, the director of Middle Eastern studies at George Washington University. "President Bush has shaken the status quo, shaken the apathy." But he added: "I do not think the ideology of Al Qaeda is fading or weakening for the moment. On the contrary, it is reacting to, and in some ways benefiting from, Western penetration. You have two contradictory forces; Islamic fundamentalism is not yet on the retreat." In Baghdad, the epicenter of the ideological struggle, the theater that now draws every global current of anti-American fanaticism, the clash of the two forces - modernizing and reactionary - that are trying to benefit from the collapse of the old Middle Eastern order is intense. When electricity is cut again, or when your car pivots at high speed because a hooded gunman has been spotted, or when fires flicker in empty streets inhabited only by skittering trash, or when not even children will look you in the eye, this whole American-led effort to transform a country and a region appears doomed. But unexpected voices rise from the chaos. "People are beginning to feel their own authority, to feel they can create things for themselves, which is the beginning of democracy," said Humam Hamoudi, a prominent Shiite in Iraq and a leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution. Such sentiment may be significant: the promise of paradise in another life has surely proved persuasive to the suicide-bomber jihadist in part because closed societies made any change in this life seem out of reach. The West has tried cold-war containment in the Middle East, living with conflict on a regional scale. It has tried the quiet or sometimes flagrant hypocrisy that characterized the response to the 1991 Algerian election or the decision to let 4,000 Saudi princes do what they like. What has not been tried is the proposition now being tested: that the Middle East is not some strange exception, but will, as Europe and the Americas have, find in democracy a cause for peace. "I think the United States has shifted the momentum in its favor," said Paul Berman, the author of "Terror and Liberalism." "The jihadists' utopia in Afghanistan has been overthrown. We have given democratic ideas a chance in Iraq, although I think we did it badly. It was never Western liberals who were going to defeat these ideologues. It was the liberals of the Muslim and Arab world, and they are stronger today." A couple of months ago, I sat in a Gaza office with a beautiful view of the Mediterranean listening to one such liberal, a Palestinian psychologist, Dr. Eyad Serraj, explain the culture of martyrdom; explain how shame is transposed into honor through self-sacrifice and defeat is conquered by assuming "the ultimate power, the power to kill"; explain how martyrs were on the level of prophets and so could not be questioned "although their acts are devastating to us politically." It was this culture that Yasir Arafat encouraged, a culture of hopelessness, of the victim, of victory only in death. In so doing, he was representative of his region. He was a dictator who, like Saddam Hussein, offered only one escape: another world. "Arafat was untouchable," said Mr. Serraj. "But Mahmoud Abbas is a human being like the rest of us. He's bringing us back to reality, beyond rhetoric and slogans. I hope we will now get realism and pragmatism." Democracy, the kind Mr. Abbas is promoting as the Palestinians' new president, is all about realism and pragmatism. That is what Iraqis are finding now as they try to form a government. Their experience may just be infectious and make America safer. At least it looks that way for now. Roger Cohen writes the "Globalist" column for The International Herald Tribune. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
