Good Things Take Time
The euphoria that set in after the elections in Iraq is over. Weeks and months go by with the winners fighting so bitterly there's no prospect of forming a government anytime soon. There's so much squabbling, in fact, that the writing of a constitution and the next round of elections may be delayed as much as six months. Should we be worried? Not really.
The failure of the factions to compromise is a disappointment, but what's being attempted is of such historic scale that reverses and disappointments are inevitable. No society has ever made the transition from authoritarianism to freedom easily. See Russia. In the Middle East, there are obstacles of tradition, religion, and vested interests that U.S. foreign policy sustained for decades until President Bush decided that the way to drain the pestilential swamp of Islamic extremism was through political liberalization. See Iraq.
We had long supported Arab regimes, and even excused oppression, in the interest of regional stability and security, but, as the president put it, "oppression became common, but stability never arrived." No single member of the Arab League is a democracy. The legitimacy of Arab regimes has stemmed not from the people but from military power or religious rule. How often we have witnessed nonelected Arab leaders underscoring the religious dimensions of their policies and including religious messages in their public rhetoric, all to gain greater legitimacy from the public; or scapegoating the Israeli-Palestinian dispute instead of meeting the challenge of their deteriorating social and economic conditions?
Thirst for freedom. These same rulers resisted our too-polite requests for political reform with the argument that it might empower the radicals hostile to the West. Well, 9/11 washed out that excuse. And the events in Iraq--and now Lebanon--have exposed a deep popular thirst for freedom. The removal of Saddam Hussein permitted change to come from the bottom up in a region historically governed from the top down. In Beirut, for the first time ever, a mass demonstration of people unafraid of the power of their rulers forced a government to resign--a dramatic change from the typical toppling of governments in the region by the military or the intelligence services, or a foreign military force. So to those who were skeptical of President Bush's language and policies, I'd say ask Bashar Assad of Syria, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and, yes, Saddam in Iraq if there isn't something to his ideas.
Still, we must see the struggle for what it is. Is it between proponents of western liberalism and backward Muslim zealots? Or is it really between authoritarian Arab regimes and extremist Muslim movements, neither of which is committed to democracy? The historic reality is that in these countries civil society has long been suppressed while citizens dependent on the state have largely kept quiet. The new Arab middle class, understandably, saw this relationship as preferable to the prospect of a Khomeini-like coup that might well bring into power the only organized and functioning opposition in most Arab countries, to wit, Islamist fundamentalists. Democratization has been feared by these same middle classes as a source of worse enslavement, particularly in states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which lack the power to root out radical Islamist groups. They worried that the Arab world would not replicate the collapse of communism, symbolized by the breaching of the Berlin Wall in 1989, but, rather, the crushing of democracy in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
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