The War for Democracy in the Middle East
By: Dr. Joseph HITTI
23/12/02
As the campaign against Iraq continues to build up, early signs of a US vision for a post-Saddam Middle East are at best disconcerting, if not alarming. That vision is either non-existent or is poorly articulated. Both President Bush and PM Blair have amply explained that the objectives of the anti-Saddam campaign have nothing to do with the oil factor. Instead, the primary objective is to make the Middle East and the world safer from apocalyptic weapons. That’s the “war on Iraq”. Implicit in this war is a vague linkage with the “war on terrorism”, the argument being that those weapons could fall in the hands of terrorist groups and thus threaten US interests and world stability. The war on Iraq is sold as part and parcel of the war on terrorism.
In the background to this strategy is yet a third, even more fuzzy, objective of bringing some elements of democracy to the region – the “war for democracy”. The premise here is that terrorism and fundamentalist ideologies flourish in impoverished, underdeveloped, and otherwise oppressed societies such as one finds in the Arab Middle East. If the US is to address the root causes of terrorism, the impending war must somehow serve as a springboard for addressing the social, political, and economic underpinnings of terrorism. Since Sept 11 the debate on that third issue has centered on the special relations between the US and Saudi Arabia as its prime example, but is symbolic of the broader Middle East in general. As annoying as this debate is to the Bush administration, many in America continue to argue that the special friendship between the two countries is a mercantile one in which oil is exchanged for political and military support. As a result, not only has this relationship subverted fundamental American values, but it has also hindered the ability of the US to pressure the Saudis on human rights and democracy, or even to get them to cooperate in the war on terrorism. The fact that the vast majority of the Sept 11 hijackers were Saudis nationals is used as the prime evidence for all these ills in the relationship. In the eyes of the American public, the US is seen as an accomplice with the Saudi regime by turning a blind eye to the oppressive Wahhabi rule in the kingdom. By the same token, the Saudi ruling family is itself seen by the Arab street as an accomplice to the pro-Israeli bias of American foreign policy. 

Nevertheless, there is a glimmer of hope for many in the Middle East that the coming war will alter the status quo. Experience has conditioned people not to trust American foreign policy, and suspicions of ulterior motives by the Bush administration are rampant. As a result, the hope for change is founded not as much on the certainty that the US administration will proactively wage the war for democracy, but more on a fatalistic sense that any change to the horrible status quo is better than the status quo itself. Hope that democracy, justice, freedoms, and economic opportunity will come about as byproducts of the war on Iraq, more by accident than by design. Furthermore, this sense of hope is nurtured mainly by those in the Middle East who have suffered for decades from the status quo: marginalized communities and nations, ethnic and religious minorities, political and human rights activists, and others.  

After half a century of the West catering to Arab dictators and oligarchs and looking the other way as these rulers jailed, killed, maimed, silenced, stunted and stifled their own people, could it be that the prevailing conditions will finally put the Middle East on the path of development and democratic institutions? Everyone knows that sooner or later, if the US is to gain the credibility it so desperately seeks in the Arab world, it must address two issues: a satisfactory resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the emancipation of the Arab peoples from archaic and oppressive governance.  Yet, in spite of strenuous efforts by the US at justifying the war on Iraq as a component of the war on terrorism, the Bush administration’s emphasis on Iraq is so abnormally strong that it has overshadowed the war on terrorism, and given the war for democracy only lip service.

The administration’s rejection of a European plan for a Palestinian state to be created within 3 years, along with a categorical refusal by the US to publicly criticize Israel for its continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank, are not good signs. It erodes Washington’s claim to be a neutral arbiter between Israel and the Arabs. It fuels radical anti-peace elements like Hamas and Hezbollah and gives them fodder to continue their bloody rampage. It gives Syria’s dictator Bashar Assad and his Hezbollah hounds in occupied Lebanon the fig leaf they need to prolong their Byzantine argument that terrorism and freedom fighting are really the same thing. It offers morally bankrupt politicians in Europe and Canada the pretext to play out populist anti-US political sentiment by refusing to call Hamas and Hezbollah the criminal terrorists that they are. Chirac of France, and up to last week, Chrétien of Canada insist that Hezbollah is not a terrorist group. Even PM Blair extended the welcome mat to the Syrian dictator whose regime is the sole remaining obstacle to a peaceful settlement in the Middle East, whose 30-year old occupation of Lebanon is in violation of several UN resolutions, and in whose jails languish untold numbers of human rights activists, political dissidents, and hundreds of innocent Lebanese civilians snatched from occupied Lebanon. Why, we ask, does the West lack the spine to call a spade a spade? Why can’t the West wage the war on Iraq at the same time that it wages the war for democracy, real justice, human rights, and political emancipation for all abused people in the region? How pitiful is this political will that cannot multitask a military war on Iraq along with a moral war against the decrepit and abusive regimes of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Libya, and Sudan?

The long-standing honeymoon between the US and the dictators and oligarchs of the region – we keep you in power, you keep oil flowing – must be undone once and for all. America’s long-term interests dictate that it begins to befriend the peoples, not the regimes, of the Middle East. Whatever plans President Bush may have for ushering democracy in the Middle East as a means to eliminate the deep wells of anger that fuel terrorism and fundamentalism have not been well articulated, if at all. US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Partnership for Progress Initiative, which he announced last week, is at best a drop in the bucket and a shy, if not insulting, gesture. His pseudo-Marshall Plan for democracy for the Arab world offers 26 million pitiful dollars for educational and business programs to the same oligarchies and dictatorships that have stunted their own people’s education and economic development for decades.  All of this smacks of the same political pestilence with which the senior Bush administration graced us in the late 1980s and early 1990s by cavorting to 20 different dictators in order to beat up on one. The junior Bush administration and the European Union must articulate a morally less bankrupt vision and openly fight the war for democracy if the war on Iraq and the war on terrorism are to succeed.