Excellent article by Victor Davis Hanson recently:
On March 14, at about the same time Western antiwar groups were organizing their annual spring demonstrations against American efforts in the Middle East, nearly a million Lebanese, including Sunni Muslims, Druze, and Christians, took to the streets of Beirut. Unlike the unhappy and despairing Westerners marching in the large cities of Europe and the United States over the last three years, the cheerful and idealistic Lebanese were not bearing placards of George W. Bush made to look like Adolph Hitler. Nor did they shout condemnations of the ?Zionist entity.?
Instead, at some risk to themselves, the demonstrators in Beirut demanded the withdrawal of Syrian troops and the creation of a legitimate government in an independent Lebanon. In this brave effort, they were following in the footsteps of an earlier, spontaneous Lebanese protest over the February 14 assassination, almost certainly at the order of Damascus, of Rafik al-Hariri, the country?s former prime minister. In sheer numbers, their March 14 outpouring dwarfed not only that February demonstration but a much publicized, Syrian-sponsored turnout by supporters of Hizballah just a week before.
The mere fact that the terrorists of Hizballah have now found themselves outnumbered in an open tug-of-war with popular dissidents, and in the humiliating position of publicly supporting the foreign occupation of their own country, is as good an indicator as any of the dizzying pace of change in the post-Saddam Hussein Middle East. The successful elections in Afghanistan in October 2004; the January 30 voting in Iraq; the Palestinian election of Mahmoud Abbas following the ostracism and death of Yasir Arafat; the grassroots furor in Lebanon?all these have created a perfect storm of sorts for Arab and Muslim strongmen. In fear both of American wrath and of their own disenfranchised masses, most of the jittery autocrats in the region are now scrambling to repackage themselves as, at the very least, parliamentarians in disguise. Facing a canceled visit from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Hosni Mubarak, Egypt?s president for life, went so far as to promise multiparty elections later this year. Even the Gulf sheikdoms have spoken of municipal voting that could theoretically include women.
Western political elites have similarly been caught off-guard by this turn of events, so threatening to their settled conviction that the situation in the region has gotten worse, not better, in the aftermath of the controversial, American-led invasion of Iraq. Only a year ago, Dana Milbank and Robin Wright were writing in the Washington Post that ?President Bush took the nation to war in Iraq with a grand vision for change in the Middle East and beyond. . . . Things have not worked out that way, for the most part.? But a year later, the Post?s Jackson Diehl, a longtime critic of the administration, was suddenly upbeat: ?Arabs are marching for freedom and shouting slogans against tyrants in the streets of Beirut and Cairo?and regimes that have endured for decades are visibly tottering. Those who claimed that U.S. intervention could never produce such events have reason to reconsider.?
On March 14, at about the same time Western antiwar groups were organizing their annual spring demonstrations against American efforts in the Middle East, nearly a million Lebanese, including Sunni Muslims, Druze, and Christians, took to the streets of Beirut. Unlike the unhappy and despairing Westerners marching in the large cities of Europe and the United States over the last three years, the cheerful and idealistic Lebanese were not bearing placards of George W. Bush made to look like Adolph Hitler. Nor did they shout condemnations of the ?Zionist entity.?
Instead, at some risk to themselves, the demonstrators in Beirut demanded the withdrawal of Syrian troops and the creation of a legitimate government in an independent Lebanon. In this brave effort, they were following in the footsteps of an earlier, spontaneous Lebanese protest over the February 14 assassination, almost certainly at the order of Damascus, of Rafik al-Hariri, the country?s former prime minister. In sheer numbers, their March 14 outpouring dwarfed not only that February demonstration but a much publicized, Syrian-sponsored turnout by supporters of Hizballah just a week before.
The mere fact that the terrorists of Hizballah have now found themselves outnumbered in an open tug-of-war with popular dissidents, and in the humiliating position of publicly supporting the foreign occupation of their own country, is as good an indicator as any of the dizzying pace of change in the post-Saddam Hussein Middle East. The successful elections in Afghanistan in October 2004; the January 30 voting in Iraq; the Palestinian election of Mahmoud Abbas following the ostracism and death of Yasir Arafat; the grassroots furor in Lebanon?all these have created a perfect storm of sorts for Arab and Muslim strongmen. In fear both of American wrath and of their own disenfranchised masses, most of the jittery autocrats in the region are now scrambling to repackage themselves as, at the very least, parliamentarians in disguise. Facing a canceled visit from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Hosni Mubarak, Egypt?s president for life, went so far as to promise multiparty elections later this year. Even the Gulf sheikdoms have spoken of municipal voting that could theoretically include women.
Western political elites have similarly been caught off-guard by this turn of events, so threatening to their settled conviction that the situation in the region has gotten worse, not better, in the aftermath of the controversial, American-led invasion of Iraq. Only a year ago, Dana Milbank and Robin Wright were writing in the Washington Post that ?President Bush took the nation to war in Iraq with a grand vision for change in the Middle East and beyond. . . . Things have not worked out that way, for the most part.? But a year later, the Post?s Jackson Diehl, a longtime critic of the administration, was suddenly upbeat: ?Arabs are marching for freedom and shouting slogans against tyrants in the streets of Beirut and Cairo?and regimes that have endured for decades are visibly tottering. Those who claimed that U.S. intervention could never produce such events have reason to reconsider.?
He writes about our dealings with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan:
Specifically, the Bush administration is said to be guilty of gross inconsistency. While vigorously promoting the benefits of democracy for Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and Syria, it has given a free pass to three regimes in particular that have long been regarded not as enemies but as key allies: Egypt and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, Pakistan in nearby South Asia. When it comes to dealing with these troubled, populous, and powerful Muslim nations, as Thomas Carothers put it in a February 2003 essay in Foreign Affairs, ?Bush the neo-Reaganite? suddenly becomes ?Bush the realist,? actively cultivating warm relations with ?friendly tyrants? of the most unsavory sort. Until this ?uncomfortable dualism? is resolved, Carothers concluded, not only ?the future of the war on terrorism but also . . . the shape and character of Bush?s foreign policy as a whole? will remain in doubt.
The objection is compelling. Picking and choosing among authoritarian regimes?heavily pressuring Iran and Syria while going lightly on Egypt and Saudi Arabia?suggests that we seek not a universal democratization of the Middle East but rather compliant governments of any autocratic or monarchic kind that will share and serve American interests, so long as they do not overtly support terror. In a war of ideas, such perceived hypocrisy?a major theme of Osama bin Laden?s infomercials damning U.S. support for the Saudi royal family?can be extremely detrimental.
Nor is inconsistency the only problem. Tens of thousands of American soldiers are fighting in the belief that replacing dictators with democrats is not only smart for America but good for the people of the Middle East. How can we go on asking them to die for freedom in the Sunni Triangle while their government subsidizes dictatorship in Egypt and Pakistan?the former a weak heartbeat away from a populist revolt, the latter a bullet away from theocracy?
The President?s bold plan appears to be based on a model of democratic contagion. We have seen such infectious outbreaks of popular government in Latin America and Eastern Europe, so we know the prognosis is not fanciful. But in the Muslim and Arab Middle East, democracy has no real pedigree and few stalwart proponents. Thus, recalcitrant autocracies will inevitably serve as sanctuaries and strongpoints for those trying to reverse the verdict in an Afghanistan, an Iraq, or a Lebanon; the idea that these same anti-democratic societies are supported by the U.S. is presently embarrassing and eventually unsustainable.
Fortunately, however, the reverse is also true. A metamorphosis of these same dictatorships would help accelerate the demand for democratization elsewhere. Far from representing a distraction in the struggle against current front-line enemies like Iran and Syria, the reformation of Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia would only further isolate and enfeeble those states?as William Tecumseh Sherman?s ?indirect approach? of weakening the rear of the Confederacy, at a considerably reduced loss of life, helped to bring to a close the frontline bloodshed of northern Virginia, or as Epaminondas the Theban?s freeing of the Messenian helots dismantled the Spartan empire at its very foundations.
Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia are not the equivalent of the Soviet Union?s satellite states of Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania. Rather, they are the East Germany, Hungary, and Poland of the unfree Middle East: pivotal nations upon whose fate the entire future of the Bush Doctrine may well hinge.
He writes about what are goals should be:
This was the mess that the Bush administration sought to clean up after 9/11, by holding out the prospect of an alternative for the expression of popular frustration in the Middle East. And the new American policy is paying real dividends, as no less an authority than the Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, of impeccably anti-American and anti-Israel credentials, explained in late February:
It?s strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.
Can the initiative be extended to the three ?friendly tyrants?? There can be no denying that, in their case, there are real and quite understandable obstacles in the way of rethinking the status quo?impediments that help explain American hesitancy thus far.
For one thing, there has grown up among us a sizable cadre of diplomats, think-tank scholars, weapons salesmen, investors, and former military officers, Right and Left, who know and like immensely the Westernized?and generous?ruling cliques of these nations. Others in the American corporate, political, and intellectual world, even if they have not forged profitable ties themselves, are firmly of the view that the autocrats in place in these countries are about as good as the United States can hope to obtain, especially as compared with some of the bleak alternatives on offer elsewhere in the region: Baathists, Islamic fascists, theocrats?and chaos. Precisely because of the relationships they have formed with prominent Americans, and their carefully cultivated veneer of moderation, the elites of Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia have earned a certain credible exemption for their annoying habit of aiding and abetting jihadists.
?One man, one vote, one time??such is the minatory clich? with which realists warn us away from headline-grabbing plebiscites. Do we really want to risk replacing the Saudi royal family or a Mubarak-style Egyptian dictatorship with jihadists of the Muslim Brotherhood stamp or Iranian-style fundamentalists who will only pursue their hatred of Israel, of the United States, and of the West under the cloak of ?democratic? legitimacy? Look at what happened in Lebanon in the 1980?s or Algeria in the 1990?s, not to mention in Iran after the Shah. If Saddam?s barbarity is exhibit A of what can evolve from the sometimes cynical appeasement of stability, the Taliban, like their Shiite counterparts in Iran, proved the awful sequel to toppled, but stable, dictatorships.
Considerations like these have led pillars of realism like James Baker, Frank Carlucci, Colin Powell, and Brent Scowcroft to harbor a skeptical view of George W. Bush?s apparent conversion to democratic idealism. And certainly, with regard to the three volatile regimes, the administration?s task is delicate beyond words. It seeks greater democracy, but not anarchy; popular government, but not of the viciously anti-American stripe; peaceful evolution, but not the sanctioning of another intransigent autocracy.
Yet, in the explosive Middle East, doing nothing, which is essentially what realist advice amounts to, is no longer an option. For better or worse, now is hardly the time to let up on the pressure for democratic change. To the contrary, it is precisely the hour to increase such pressure wisely.
An obvious first step is to mark our distance from the three autocracies?indeed, we have already begun to do so, if with nowhere near the required consistency. With tact, American separation need not appear overtly punitive, nor need we gratuitously slander former allies even as we publicly prefer their internal voices of reform. Secretary Rice?s decision to avoid Egypt on her recent Middle East trip was what prompted Mubarak to pledge Egypt?s first multiparty presidential election later this year, and is a model of what can be done in the short term.
There is much more, it’s a must read.
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