Democracy and terrorism

Imagine a feisty man cocksurely driving his gas-guzzler to a gas station, filling up and paying the wallah a handsome amount of money for the gasoline, day in and day out; year in and year out.

Behind the gas station a family of the owner of the station lives: the man did not care or was unconcerned about the little details of what goes on between the gas station attendant and the family behind, except sometimes he waved hi or bye to the lads.

One day on a crisp autumn morning, the man drove up to the gas station accompanied by his family. The innocent looking youths he used to wave to snuck behind his car and started smashing his widows with sledgehammers.

The man and his children sustained wounds and fled bleeding from this rather ghastly scene. As he drove away he pondered "why the heck did those kids attack me?".

"I cannot afford not to go to the gas station; oil is what keeps my truck, my business moving," the man contemplated. "If I can only help the family seize the station I can strike a deal with the members of the family and get my gas and be safe at the same time," he thought.

That's for you a Friedmanesque rendition of the neocon theory of the relation between terror and democracy. The US is in need of Middle East oil. All along, the US backed regimes that provided stability which allowed for the free flow of oil. The blowback of years of resentment for US backing these regimes had come in the horrendous events of September 11, or so goes the neocons' argument.

The US was smitten twice on that fateful day: first by the winged beasts from the skies, and second by exposing the moral bankruptcy of having coddled authoritarianism, the neocons concluded.

As US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice puts it, "For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the region. And we achieved neither. Now we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of the people."

The US, henceforth, has embarked extemporaneously on a quixotic crusade to spread democracy in the broader Middle East to staunch terrorism and the anti-Americanism tide sweeping the region, or so is the justification for the current policy.

But is it true that democracy reduces terrorism, or is the supposition dead wrong on empirical and logical grounds?

F. Gregory Gause III, a Middle East scholar, challenges the supposition head on. Gause is no "feckless" wishy-washy liberal that neocons love to bash, or lefty resentful of the US political system. The man is schooled in realism and American pragmatism, and a Republican to boot.

A clairvoyant, who a decade earlier took the Clinton Administration to task over its "dual containment" policy in the Gulf, and his position panned out subsequently.

He argues the claim that there is a link between authoritarian regimes and terrorism is not even borne out by the data provided by the US government itself.

Of the major terrorist incidents reported by the US Department of State, 269 occurred in countries designated by Freedom House as "free" countries, 119 in "partly free" countries, 138 in "not free" countries.

This not to argue, according to Gause, that democracy produces terrorism, but rather "the numbers simply indicate that there is no relationship between the incidence of terrorism in a given country and the degree of freedom enjoyed by its citizens".

Otherwise, as Gause points out, how could one explain that the largest democracy, India, has more incidents of terrorism than the largest authoritarian, China, 203 to zilch.

Moreover, Gause challenges the idea on logical grounds.

The basic assumption of the Bush administration is that democracy will give voice to dissidents who wouldn't need to resort to violence if peaceful means are provided through the ballot box. But that wrongly assumes that terrorists demand political participation a la America.

On the contrary, Al Qaida types loathe Western values and its political systems. Farther, if free and fair elections were to take place in the Arab world, it will more likely bring forces hostile to US policies and interests.

"When it works, liberal democracy is the best form of government. But there is no evidence it reduces or prevents terrorism. The fundamental assumption of the Bush administration's push for democracy in the Arab world is seriously flawed," Gause concludes.

Democracy is desirable in and of itself; but it is hard to resist saying, it ain't regime type, it's the policy, stupid!

Albadr S.S. Al Shateri, is a UAE political analyst and writer.