Iraq war and democracy in the region

Votaries of regime change are in ballyhooed mood these days. The protestation from the beltway is that they're vindicated, the Iraq invasion has had its ripple effects.

With much aplomb, they point to the recent events in the region from the Iraqi and the Palestinian elections to the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, to the impending Egyptian multi-candidate presidential elections, and political changes in the Arab states of the Gulf.

The claim is made by US President George W. Bush, no less. In an address to the National Defence University the president declared: "At last, clearly and suddenly, the thaw has begun."

On June 28, on the first anniversary of transfer of authority to the interim Iraqi government, Bush averred, with a tone of noblesse oblige, that his war in Iraq had brought about a democratic groundswell: "As Iraqis make progress towards a free society, the effects are being felt beyond Iraq's borders …

"Across the broader Middle East, people are claiming their freedom. In the last few months, we've witnessed elections in the [occupied] Palestinian Territories and Lebanon.

Rise of freedom

"These elections are inspiring democratic reformers in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Our strategy to defend ourselves and spread freedom is working.

"The rise of freedom in this vital region will eliminate the conditions that feed radicalism and ideologies of murder, and make our nation safer."

In a similar vein (read vain), Karl Zinsmeister declares, in the ultra-conservative The American Enterprise, "Of course the elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, and all that has followed in Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere didn't just happen.

"They required enormous acts of American will. Anyone who thinks these breakthroughs would have occurred under a Commander-in-Chief less bold and stubborn than George W. Bush is mad." Hallelujah!

Even some liberal critics of the war in Iraq are hedging their bets. One rhetorically asked "What if Bush's insane, self-serving and dangerous policies do end up causing a multi-generational chain reaction in the Middle East, jump-starting the democratisation of the whole region?"

To read and hear such cries of hosanna for the invasion of Iraq and its democratisation corollaries is to be reminded of the Irish litterateur Oscar Wilde's aphorism that "People who count their chickens before they are hatched, act very wisely, because chickens run about so absurdly that it is impossible to count them accurately."

Hitherto, Iraq as the fulcrum of the transformation of the Middle East proved to be worse than what US Senator Joseph Biden called cockamamie idea; it proved to be ignis fatuus.

Those who've done much to have the eagle's talons, to borrow Twain's words, clenched on Iraq are crestfallen and are whistling in the dark.

Whistling along are two famed Middle East specialists: historian Bernard Lewis and political scientist Fouad Ajami. Both men provided much meretricious intellectual justification for the war.

And now they both simultaneously published articles in Foreign Affairs (May/June 2005) extolling the virtues of the Iraq war.

Lewis after praising the Islamic tradition and its compatibility with freedom and justice wrote that "the Iraqi election may prove a turning point in Middle Eastern history no less important than the arrival of General Bonaparte and the French Revolution in Egypt more than two centuries ago".

Ajami, more emphatic, argued that Bush had "planted the flag of liberty" in the Arab region. He concludes that "suddenly it seems like the autumn of the dictators".

"Something different has been injected into this fight. The United States a great foreign power that once upheld the Arab autocrats, fearing what mass politics would bring now braves the storm," he adds.

Elsewhere, Ajami is so enthused to the turn of events that Bush becomes the eponymous of the region. Ajami writes: "To venture into the Arab world, as I did recently … is to travel into Bush Country".

"It was Iraq of course," Ajami declares, "that gave impetus to this new Arab history. And it is in Iraq that the nobility of this American quest comes into focus."

Wrong portrayal

Lewis and Ajami are two individuals who made their careers on the animadversions concerning Arab culture, history and politics.

Previously, to read Lewis's political essays on Islam and the Arabs is to witness emoticons with curmudgeon faces flying off your screen.

Arabs or Muslims are reductively portrayed as enraged, resentful and otherwise wrathful.

Ajami equally made a career on Arab predicament, maladroit politics and his most recent supercilious assertion that the Arabs' "malignant political culture" must be "rehabilitated and placed in receivership".

Of the two, it must be said, Lewis, a debonair, is more nuanced in his last piece albeit one of a kind.

Both, all the same, have shared equal disdain for Arabs blaming their mishaps and unfortunate states on the West. They have both insisted that Arabs are merely playing the blame and victimhood games.

But for those who always discounted the external factors in Arab political life are now cock-a-hoop and quick to point to the positive effects of the US intervention: an intellectual somersault, nay, a bravura, indeed.

So, whatever is wrong with Arabs is their responsibility; whatever positive developments occur in their region should be attributed to Washington's officious endeavour to modernise and democratise this hapless part of the world.

Then, it stands to reason, the external factors were always the stumbling block. Once that changed, everything fell in its right place.

US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on June 23 that US actions in Iraq have "encouraged democratic movements in regions that have long been breeding grounds for violent anti-Western extremism".

Then he justified the wrongdoings in the Iraq war by comparing them to those that happened in the 1776 American War of Independence.

But hear what the hero of that saga had to say. In his farewell address, George Washington had admonished his fellow citizens to "avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty".

He'd urged the nation to be an example to the world: "It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence."

If one were to have differences with US policy it should be to the extent that it is at variance with the other George W's wise counsel.

Tony Judt recently argued that "the well-being of the United States of America is of inestimable importance to the health of the whole world". I fully concur.

Dr Albadr S.S. Alshateri is a UAE-based political analyst and writer