This is the 6th article in the series on the new shift in US foreign policy toward the Arab despots --- to pressure them in a variety of ways to liberalize and open up to democratic trends, the best way in the long run to combat radical Islamist fundamentalisms and their support for Islamo-fascist terrorism of the Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas sort. President Bush announced the new policy last fall, part of the wider ideological war on terrorism that was a major motive for toppling Saddamite Iraq; and he has subsequently criticized three traditional Arab allies of the US --- Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Tunisia --- for their authoritarian practices. As the previous article noted, some of the 22 Arab dictatorships have more encouraging democratic prospects than others --- roughly a handful of them. What follows in the commentary is lots of data singling out those more favorably situated countries, based on a variety of measures.

One More Article To Come

A 7th and an 8th article will deal directly with Iraq's transforming prospects, much of which now hinge perilously on the ability of the US occupying forces to quell the existing terrorism and limited insurrection, either by the direct use of force or --- an encouraging sign in itself --- the use of local Iraqi forces as in Fallujah to take over at least a large share of responsibility for maintaining security. Will those Iraqi forces, led by a former Baathist general, do what the general and the local leaders in Fallujah promised to do: disarm the insurrectionists, isolate and turn over the terrorists, and maintain law and order?

Right now, nobody can say.

What is pretty clear by now --- a point we'll hammer home in the 7th article --- is that there aren't many Iraqis to develop a democratic Iraq: rather, religious and ethnic sects, plus tribal divisions within them: Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite. When we get around to clarifying this point, we'll draw on what we've learned about democratic transformation from the successful military interventions of the US and its NATO allies in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s . . . another area of the world, it was said, incorrigibly prone to ethnic hatred and warfare, unable to evolve in democratic ways. The Austro-Hungarians had learned that; the Ottomans just as long --- or so we were told; and then so had Yugoslav's leader, Milosevik and his demagogic government, after Marshall Tito's death in the 1980s.

The doomsters, as it turned out, were wrong about the Balkans. They may be wrong too about Iraq and some of the other Arab countries.

Part One:
THE ECONOMIST'S RANKING OF DEMOCRATIC PROSPECTS

An unusually stimulating list of indices for ranking the Arab countries' democratic prospects appeared last month in the admirable British weekly, The Economist. Its table is reproduced directly from that article, and all references should be strictly to it, not the buggy site.





Illuminating as The Economist's measures are, note right off that they have a drawback: they don't have some non-Arab control countries --- say, Bosnia in the former Yugoslavia or Bangladesh in South Asia or Indonesia in SE Asia, never mind Turkey in the Middle East itself --- as comparisons. The three latter countries are overwhelmingly Muslim, with tiny non-Muslim minorities; Bosnia is nearly 50% Muslim, with about 37% of the remaining population Serbs and 13% Croat. All four are electoral democracies; at least one of them, Turkey, is clearly near the fuzzy borderline between electoral democracies and more solid liberal ones. It's a strange, regrettable drawback.

What to do about it?

Fortunately, we can offset it to an extent . . . even though there's no direct way for the buggy prof to parallel the kinds of rankings that The Economist uses. No surprise. That admirable weekly isn't a scholarly journal that sets out explicitly its methodologies. Even so, there are other sources that more or less parallel The Economist rankings that we can draw on to compare the prospects of the Arab countries with those of the four Muslim electoral democracies just mentioned.

So, here for what it's worth --- transposing the rankings of the four countries just mentioned in terms that approximate, let us hope, The Economist's measures --- are how they would compare with the table above.

 

 

Country	Political Rights	Press Freedom	Rule of Law (Corruption)	Religious Freedom	Women's Rights	Economic Openness	Total
Turkey	6	6	3	9	8	8	40
Indonesia	6	3	2	8	9	8	36
Bosnia	4	1	3	9	8	7	32
Bangladesh	4	4	3	7	4	5	28

The sources for this table, note, are a mixture taken from Freedom House and World Audit. The latter organization is a composite that draws from Freedom House, Transparency International, and two or three other sites that deal with media freedom and so on.

The rule of law in this table is proxied by corruption, which is measured around the world each year by Transparency International through the use of survey techniques. For economic openness, the CIA World Factbook allows for a guess, nothing more. For women's rights, the same site has information on women's literacy and longevity compared to men's, and then you can make guesses for women's participation in politics based on whether there are women in prominent elected office.

Use the Ranking Scores or Data with Caution

Yes, use with caution for a couple of reasons.

First off, both tables here are going to involve guesswork, the buggy prof's probably even more so . . . especially with the need, given The Economist's scale from 1-10, to transpose Freedom House's and World Audit's measures. They rank countries democratic performance on an inverted scale of 1-10, with 1 the best score and 10 the worst. You'll notice that in the next section of this commentary, where Freedom House's overall ranking for 120 countries is set out. Meanwhile, if it helps to make sense of the two tables, consider that the top 20-25 industrial democracies in West Europe and the English-speaking world would each have a total score, on all six categories, somewhere in the high 50's or 60's.

Second, even without guesswork of this sort, the numerical scores in each category and the totals for the countries should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Despite the numerical measures from 1-10, these are what we call ordinal --- or ranked --- data. They are not strictly quantitative (interval) data. Meaning?

Well, this: if you look at the category for press freedom in The Economist's table, Morocco is given a score of "6" and Jordan "3". That does not mean that Morocco's press freedom is twice that of Jordan's. The fact is, we just don't know; all we can say is that a score of 6 is better than 5, 5 better than 4, 4 better than 3, and so on. If, to clarify further, one country scored a perfect "10" for press freedom --- say, Denmark if the measures were applied to them --- we couldn't say that the press was 10 times freer in Denmark than in Libya with its "1". It could be twice as great in freedom than Libya's --- with, say, a score "6" for Morocco 30% better than Libya's 1 --- or it could be a 100 times greater. There is just no way to be sure here.

This brief commentary has been prodded by a good article by Dominique Moisi in the International Herald Tribune on the EU's problems and prospects at a time when the Union has chug-a-chugged, struggling all the way, kilometer after kilometer, to a critical juncture in its history: in two days, 10 new East European states will be joining it . . . almost all former Communist countries, with three of them part of the Soviet imperial state. Almost all of these countries, you should note --- Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, the tiny three Baltic states, Bulgaria, Rumania, Slovakia, and Slovenia --- are already in NATO, their post-Communist, post-Soviet independence now secured by that alliance.

For the EU, the expansion should be a time of celebration everywhere in Europe. It ends the division of the Continent that emerged after WWI with the Communist triumph in the Soviet Union, then its imperial expansion eastward, then --- after WWII --- its hold over all of East and Central Europe save in Yugoslavia and Albania to the boundary between East and West Europe. It also marks the definitive triumph of democratic development and market-oriented economies. Alas, the existing West European members of the EU are anything but jubilant right now, hardly in a mood to celebrate the historic moment . . . or, come to think of it, anything at all. Such is the gloomy mood that prevails all around the EU. Even the title of the IHT article, "Europe Comes Together in Fear and Trepidation" captures pretty faithfully that widespread gloom and pessimism. [For the stats on public opinion, see the Euobarometer Report for Autumn, 2003, in this buggy article.]

For that matter, even the new East European members aren't certain what kind of European Union they're joining, what with all its huge problems set out below. Those of you who have followed the several buggy articles on the EU's economic and political problems and prospects --- especially back in the late fall last year and into January this year --- will note how the following commentary, plus the link to article in question, are in line with the lengthy arguments set out in those earlier buggy pieces.

Part One:
DOMINIQUE MOISI ON THE FLUX IN EU IDENTITIES

Dominique Moisi, the author of the IHT article, will be well known to most of you: above all the students in ps 129 last quarter (the war on terrorism), where we read an article or two of his about EU-US relations. A Harvard-trained Ph.D. in political science who heads a prestigious institute in Paris, he's always informative and thoughtful, bringing to bear a solid theoretical perspective on international relations that is rare for a French commentator . . . even a professor. He's best known for a book he wrote back in the late 1990s. Signed by him and the then French Foreign Minister in the left-wing government of Lionel Jospin, Hubert Vendrine, its argument coined the term "hyper-power" (hyper-puissance) to describe the US global position.  

 

In Line with Buggy Views

The earlier buggy articles on the increasingly divergent prospects between the US and almost all the EU countries --- whether economic, techological, diplomatic, or military: for that matter, overall national solidarity and societal vigor --- appeared, as we just noted, late last fall and into this winter. See, for instance, this link, and this one, and this one. In the latter article, there's a link to a summary of an official admission of the EU executive Commission that its highly touted goals at a summit meeting in Lisbon at the end of the 1990s --- namely, to make the EU the most vigorous and technological advanced economic region in the world --- are not going to be met.

That is putting it mildly.

For the last three years, the EU has been stagnating economically, and it's clear by now that with the exception of a handful of countries --- Britain with its pro-market orientation and four or five very tiny homogenous states in Scandinavia, plus perhaps Holland and Ireland --- these economic troubles aren't cyclical: they're structural, part-and-parcel of the failure to reform vigorously the overweening regulatory apparatus, high taxes, and a vast network of welfare that have helped erode entrepreneurial vigor, the work ethos, and a sense of personal responsibility among far too many Europeans, most of whom, it seems, are mainly excited about vacation time . . . the Germans especially. Studies show they work about 9-10 weeks less a year than Americans. Well, if that's what they want, fine. You pays your money and you gets your choice, no? The trouble is, German economic growth --- for that matter, growth anywhere in the EU outside Scandinavia and Britain --- has ground to a halt for three years now. Over the previous decade, German growth wasn't much better. If anything, it resembled Japanese stagnation.

Meanwhile, in Asia, billions of Chinese, Indians, and others are working frantically to raise their standards of living.

Hard to believe that those billions of toiling, increasingly educated Asians are upset that the leisure-loving Germans and other West Europeans live in countries whose governments --- faced with stagnant growth, declining work forces, and swarms of welfare and other social commitments --- seem to be going slowly broke . . . unable to meet all their commitments and increasingly worried, if they seek to deregulate their economies and reduce spending and taxes, about either rejection by the voters in the next election or social turmoil that includes spasms of uncoiled violence.

This is the fifth article in the ongoing series, started about three weeks ago --- interrupted now and then by some other buggy commentaries --- about the prospects of democracy in Iraq and the Arab world . . . particularly in the light of the new Bush administration's initiative to push for liberalizing changes in the Arab world. Announced with fanfare last autumn and just about to emerge through the bureaucratic pipeline into a clear doctrine to be presented at the G-8 Summit meeting in June, that new initiative sparked off this series . . . along with buggy comments then and in subsequent articles why democratic changes in the 22 Arab countries and elsewhere in Islam are in the US national interest. Remember here, the war on terrorism is only partly military. It is partly also a matter of intelligence, police work, and improved homeland security.

At bottom, though, it remains an ideological struggle to combat and isolate radical Islamist fundamentalists and their terrorist followers, by above all promoting change in the failed autocratic states: democratic, cultural, and economic. As it happens, the current article is now finished. As it also happens, a sixth and final article will be needed to deepen the analysis of Iraq's democratic prospects and those of other Arab countries.



PART ONE: CAN ARAB COUNTRIES BECOME DEMOCRATIC?

The Crux Issue

The question just posed is pivotal to all our inquiries in this series on the new Bush initiative to promote liberalizing democratic changes in the Arab world --- some 22 countries, with a total of 300 million people.

As late as April 2003, all were autocratic and relied ultimately for their survival on the secret police. In strict political terms, they differed mainly in the extent to which the use of coercion was at the forefront of political and social life or, alternatively, was more latent and kept in the background. Not, as you'll see, a trivial distinction. Those countries where dictatorial regimes relied less on force and had some underlying sources of popular support and legitimacy --- all of them monarchical, like the small Gulf States or Jordan or Morocco: all of them, come to that, carefully limiting Islamist intrusions into political life --- have also created a variety of better democratic prospects: a somewhat freer media, more broad-based political parties, better treatment of women. And though all the parliaments in these and the other Arab states remain fairly weak, little more than rubber-stamp institutions, they do differ in the extent to which criticisms of the government can be voiced.

To use the terminology that was set out in the table on different kinds of political systems --- democratic and non-democratic --- the more promising Arab depotisms are soft authoritarian in nature as opposed to hard-line ones like Saudi Arabia or Syria or the Sudan or totalitarian like Baathist Iraq under Saddam. That table, you'll eventually see, is found later in this article, used to illustrate some points once more. More to the point, in the next and final article in the series, a variety of quantitative indices will rank the Arab countries in their democratic prospects: developments like the level of literary, GDP, magnitude of corruption, freedom of the media etc.

 

Diverse Prospects

Interestingly, as you'll also see, these more promising Arab states --- only a handful --- have been recently joined by Algeria . . . especially as the brutal civil war with fanatical Islamist terrorists, a decade long, has wound down and relatively free elections were just held for the presidency. Since last April, post-Saddamite Iraq --- for all the recent spate of violence, essentially centered in the Fallujah area (plus the wider Sunni triangle) and Moqtada Sadr's radical Shia group in Najaf (at most, a few hundred gunmen as supporters) --- seems to have joined this promising group as well. If the current violent challenges there are suppressed, then --- what with all the other encouraging changes under way in Iraq --- there's a good chance that a consensual Iraqi political system with liberalizing promise will be elected in popular elections next January.

A big if? Sure.

We'll return to all their democratic prospects, Iraq's included --- setting out some rankings on a variety of indices that amount to democratic pre-requisites --- in a minute or two. For the time being, fix your attention on the Arab exception, globally speaking, and the implications for the war on terrorism.

 

PART TWO: THE ARAB EXCEPTION IN THE LATEST DEMOCRATIC WAVE, AT ANY RATE TO DATE

The First Three Waves

Over the last two centuries, democratic developments across countries have unfolded in clustered waves. Samuel Huntington, known to buggy visitors for his pioneering views on the clash of civilizations, has also been a pioneer on these waves. He identified three over these last two centuries or so. More accurately, we can identify four.

(1) Starting with the US revolution of 1776, followed about a decade later by the French revolution --- far more radical in its ideology --- the first wave lasted for about a half century, leading to warfare throughout Europe and Latin America and ending with the monarchical defeat in Europe of Napoleonic France and later the Latin American struggles for independence in the 1820s. Out of all this turmoil, only the US emerged as a solidly institutionalized democracy, but the legacies of those decades continued, ideologically and otherwise --- often with violence --- to shape Europe and Latin America for decades. [The British themselves, drawing a lesson, opted by the mid-19th century for gradual national independence with democratic legacies in the English-speaking colonies like Canada and Australia, a policy later extended to the rest of the empire, often with limited violent struggle for freedom, after 1945.]

Don't worry: the article on Iraq and its democratic prospects --- for that matter, those of the other Arab countries --- is still in the works, scheduled to start appearing tomorrow . . . probably in three or four versions. In the meantime, a good article link in the New York Times science section today directly relates to what the lectures in political science 121 --- international relations theory --- have been dealing with the last month or so. What follows is an extended version for buggy visitors that was sent earlier today to the students in that class and other subscribers to gordon-newspost.

Note: no need now to click on the Times link. First, follow the argument uncoiled here, then --- at the appropriate point toward the end --- you'll find the link again, at which point click away.

 

PART ONE: WHAT THE ARGUMENT HERE SEEKS TO DO

(i.) Our Aim

The commentary should help you understand the rooted mental causes of power politics and warfare, the outcome of millions of years of evolution by hominoids and modern homo sapiens in small clans of 10-40 or 50 people, the maximum limit imposed by the need to gather food by foraging and hunting on a daily basis. For those 6-7 million years --- until the agricultural revolution and the emergence of city states in Mesopotamia and elsewhere around 6000 years ago --- those pre-humans and then our own species who always lived in clans were all genetically related to the other members. Literally; nothing mythical about it. The outcome, charged with wider political implications?

It was two-fold:

• On the one hand, individual self-identity was intimately and inseparably bound up for almost all our evolution with the identity and survival of the clan-group. For all those millions of years, no individual or his spouse and children could survive on their own, let alone flourish. Period.

• On the other hand, the group-identity of the individual clan was forged by means of self-enhancing beliefs and categories in starkly competitive opposition to all other groups. In psychological terms, this meant for almost all our evolution as a species --- modern homo-sapiens no more than 100-200,000 years old --- that our brains and consciousness were developed in strict them-us terms toward all outside groups and their members, always marked by stereotypes and other simplifying categories.

What follows? Well, consider carefully the title of the next section:

 

(ii.) Contemporary Nationalism and National-Identities Are A Matter of Both Hard-Wired
Propensities And Social Learning: The Wider Consequences for International Relations.

As you'll see, thanks to this evolutionary history, the them-us distinction in people's mind --- remember, marked by competitive categories and simplification: call these stereotypes --- seems to be hard-wired into our brains and social life, the point of the NY Times article as you'll see . . . and also, come to that, additional evidence for the buggy prof's lectures. Note right off though: the specific content of any group's social identity --- these days, say, national identities encompassing 1.3 billion Chinese or 290 million Americans --- is a matter of social learning, a cultural product. So too are the degrees of mistrust towards others, never mind the extent of aggressivity or hostility.

These can also change noticeably over time. Think of the big shifts in German national identity from the 1930s and WWII era of Nazi raw aggression and rippling racist extermination to the Federal Republic today. (Remember too: the big changes in German nationalism and the development of a stable democratic country derived from total defeat in WWII and the occupation of the western sectors by the US, Britain, and France. Similar changes in Japan emerged out of the same circumstances of WWII, with the US alone in overhauling Japanese institutions and policies.)

Still, Germans remain ethnocentric --- as do the other EU countries (Britain's national identity and resistance to European federalism more powerful than others in EU survey [polls) --- and the EU is far from being a unified federal state, let alone one anchored in a solid, overarching shared identity across 25 member states. For that matter, German national identity still retains certain competitive categories --- not least, to judge by the dominant thrust in the German media nowadays, in terms directed at the US a major "the other".

These general points, abstract as they are, should emerge with clarity as you read on.

 Even as the 5th and last article on the democratic prospects of the Arab Middle East --- specifically, starting with post-Saddamite Iraq --- is close to being in the pipeline, a visitor left us a set of comments that deserve to be replied to. They deal less with Iraq than with the Arab peoples as a whole. When you've finished reading the comments and the buggy reply, you should be able to grasp better a couple of key points in this mini-series on the Middle East's democratic prospects:

1) What the differences are between a solid, effective liberal democracy on one side and, on the other, transitional democracies of a post-authoritarian character, marked mainly by free elections but deficient in many of the key characteristics that underpin liberal democratic practices . . . political, legal, and social.

2) What seems more realistic, and still very significant should it materialize, about Iraq's prospects for emerging as the first clearly electoral democracy with some clear prospects for further democratic development . . . and all that this would likely mean by way of spillovers, deliberate or otherwise, for the 280 million Arabs still living in 21 dictatorial regimes, never mind 70 million Iranians just next door to Iraq.

Don't forget: those spillovers if they occur are part and parcel of the war on terrorism.

That war isn't just military or matters of intelligence and legal punishment, nor of improved homeland security. It is also a clash of ideas and ideals. In particular, some way has to be found to dampen the enthusiasm that now exists on the grass roots level throughout the Arab world for radical Islamist movements and terrorist heroes, seen as champions of Islam under assault.

On this score, democratic development would be the best cure. As the survey evidence cited in the second and fourth articles in this mini-series showed, there's a clear correlation between democratic government and the population's condemning, say, bin Ladenism as murderous and criminally evil. Secular and democratic Turkey, for instance, is almost as negative about bin Ladenism and Al Qaeda as the European democracies. Among the Arab countries cited, Morocco does better in this connection than Jordan, and they both do better than Saudi Arabia . . . at any rate, in the survey carried out after 9/11 by the Saudi secret police, which showed that 95% of Saudi men in their twenties and thirties admired bin Laden and his terrorist massacres. Not surprisingly, as we'll see in the next article, Morocco scores better than Jordan in their democratic prospects. Saudi Arabia's ranking, by contrast, is near the bottom of the barrel.



Prof Bug:

I'm not as optimistic as you about the prospects of "yanking 21 Arab dictatorships into the 21st century". True, the Allies imposed a democratic government on Nazi Germany after World War II. However, the Nazi Party and its ideology was only around for roughly 20 years (counting the interwar period), while Islam and the fundamentalist versions have been around a lot longer.

Another difference is that the Germans were much more receptive to American occupation than any Arab country, because the German choice was to be occupied by the West or the Russians. The Germans generally preferred to be in the Western zone; hence the construction of the Berlin Wall. By contrast, there is no such situation for the Arabs: they're already convinced that the U.S. is inherently evil, and they certainly don't look to the U.S. to save them from anything. Can these people really be turned into liberal democrats? I'm not so sure, and I'd hate to think that the lives of Allied troops are being wasted on what may well be a futile effort.

--- Michael




THE BUGGY REPLY Michael:

Thank you for the comments. I'll try to deal with some of them here in this article, with most of the key points by way of reply --- and other ramifying analysis --- needing to await the next article in the series. It should be published soon. Right now, there's still some literature I'm wading through.

Liberal Democracy vs. Transitional Democracy

Keep in mind one thing: your reference at the end to "liberal democrats" is misleading. Nobody has claimed that will happen in Iraq . . . not soon, maybe not for a long time; maybe even --- I hope not --- forever. For the time being, we've been talking about something more modest: the prospect that Iraq can move into the transitional democratic category. That means, at a minimum, free, competitive elections (if need be, with international monitoring); political parties free to organize and select candidates for office; a consensual government grounded in the electoral process; and the beginnings of a rule of law.

Such a start would entail some transparency and accountability of the executive and bureaucracies, a progressively independent judiciary, and increasingly law-abiding police, security, and military forces that are accountable to the constitution . . . not to the politicians or leaders in control.

 

By Contrast, an Effective Liberal Democracy Requires:

1. A vigorous rule of law has to exist --- with everyone, even presidents and parliamentarians and generals and judges and rich people, treated fairly and equitably in the same manner. Simultaneously, the civil liberties of all citizens have to be effectively protected, above all by a well-anchored system of due process and transparency based on impartial law. And --- one measure of all this --- corruption and nepotism in public life have to be energetically curbed and effectively punished.

2. Governmental laws and regulations have to be generally consented to voluntarily, as legitimate and morally obligating, by the vast majority of the citizenry --- rather than obeyed out of self-interest or fear of being punished by the courts and police for evasions. One clear measure here: spontaneous compliance with the laws and policies even by those who opposed their passage through democratic means.

3. The government needs to be able to ensure that it can tax effectively in a constitutionally designated way, with the ability to raise revenue for its basic services and other policies that are decided upon by proper legal and constitutional processes. Some sense of equity needs to exist here. Massive tax evasion is a sign that the citizenry doesn't feel a moral obligation to be law-abiding.

4. A liberal democracy also requires a vigorous civil society: a free media, free trade unions, independent self-regulating professions like law and medicine, a politically independent system of higher education, cause groups galore, free churches, business and financial associations, interest groups, solidly rooted political parties at the grass roots level, and the like.

5. The higher-quality liberal democracies --- Northern Europe and the English-speaking democracies, say --- are marked by a wide radius of trust among the citizenry, which allows a great deal of spontaneous cooperation for common ends. When, by contrast, mistrust and cynicism flourish among wide swathes of the population, they are clear signs of a narrow or fragmented radius of trust. In lower-quality democracies --- or transitional ones, never mind authoritarian countries --- serious cleavages in their socieites may divide the population along the lines of ethnic or tribal gaps, family clans, social classes, and possibly regions. Worse, frequently, mutual suspicions and fears may congeal along such cleavages and create not just strong mistrust but outright hostility among the groups in any country.

In such social circumstances, little spontaneous compliance with formal laws and regulations will exist. Corruption and tax evasion will likely be rife well. Then, too, the prospects of eruptive violence --- whether low key like limited terrorism, at other times more brutal terrorism, or flare-ups of ethnic or class-based warfare --- may hover nearby. If democratic elections do exist, they may help contain the violence --- no small matter --- and at times lead eventually to reforms that encourage stronger constitutional development and a more intensely shared national identity that offset group suspicions and mistrust. Even so, to put it mildly, the obstacles blocking success here are legion.

This, the 4th article in the series, looks directly at the compelling need for the US and its allies to promote democratic and economic changes in the Arab status-quo . . . dominated by 21 dictatorial regimes and failed economies save for the tiny, oil-rich Persian Gulf States, with the despotisms and their winner-take-all politics (not to mention the rampant corruption and nepotism) varying only in the degree of repression and use of brutal force, as well as their foreign policy alignment with or against the US and the West. Clerical-fascist Iran, a country of 70 million where a diehard group of militant Shiite leaders rules in a repressive manner despite the elected president and parliament --- despite, for that matter, a survey carried out in 2002 that showed nearly 90% of the population critical of the clerical regime --- is another major problem country for the US. Two of these states, Iran and Syria, are pursuing WMD programs with vigor. Libya's wacky leader, Khadaffi --- whose pronoucements often remind you of Daffy Duck's in the Loony Tunes cartoons (even the same half-hysterical sputterings) --- has recently renounced his programs and opened up to international inspections.

Meanwhile, both Syria and Iran seem to be supporting a variety of terrorist movements . . . no doubt some inside Iraq itself right now.

Post-Saddamite Iraq, now in transition --- experiencing a turbulent period that has to be expected to persist the closer the June 30th deadline of transferring sovereignty to a care-taking transitional government there, itself to run the first democratic elections next January --- is the pivot here. If a consensual, constitutional government can be created there with growing security and economic prospects, then the spillovers onto the rest of the Middle East will be of great momentum, something Tony Blair agrees as much with as George Bush. As the British Prime Minister noted in an article published earlier this week in London,

"If we succeed -- if Iraq becomes a sovereign state, governed democratically by the Iraqi people; the wealth of that potentially rich country, their wealth; the oil, their oil; the police state replaced by the rule of law and respect for human rights -- imagine the blow dealt to the poisonous propaganda of the extremists. Imagine the propulsion toward change it would inaugurate all over the Middle East."

PART ONE: OUR CURRENT AIM HERE

So, to rephrase Tony Blair's statement as a query, what are the prospects of democratic change in Iraq and the larger Arab world succeeding?

That key query is precisely what the next article in the mini-series will grapple with. If need be --- if the argument there requires more space --- the series will be extended to yet a sixth article.

Here, in this article, our task is more focused. Given the spun-out nature of this argument over the last two weeks, never mind its complexities and ramifying analysis, it seems advisable to help remind faithful buggy visitors what its pivotal points so far amount to: in particular, why it's essential that the US and its allies in Iraq persist in the campaign to initiate sweeping changes, political and economic, in the dangerous Middle East status-quo. As things now stand in the 21 Arab dictatorships, they're a fertile breeding ground --- amid a burgeoning population explosion, half the 300 million Arab peoples under the age of 15, with half of all Arab men in their late teens and early twenties unemployed, no prospects at all --- for future jihad-obsessed recruitment to Islamist terrorism.

Something has to be done to change that status quo. On their own, the Arab despots themselves are unwilling to initiate the needed drastic reforms --- on the contrary. Right now, only the US, along with its democratic allies in tansitional Iraq --- from Japan, Australia, South Korea, and Mongolia (yes, democratic) in Asia to 20 of our 25 NATO allies --- have the power to begin nudging change of the sort that Prime Minister Blair endorses in his statement.

 

PART TWO: THE US AND ITS ALLIES' ASSAULT
ON THE ARAB STATUS QUO

(i.) What Changes in US Policy?

American foreign policy, as the first article in the series documented, has undergone a radical shift the last few months, visible in outline form even before that, though, as part of the effort to topple Saddamite Iraq and seek to promote there the first consensual constitutional government in the Middle East, with guarantees of respect for human and civil liberties . . . including a parliament, the right to form political parties, a new constitutionally loyal military and police force, a free media, and the beginning of a rule of law.

A rule of law, as the second and third articles on democratic government noted, entails fair and equal treatment of all the citizenry of the country, however powerful or humble of whatever their ethnicity and religion; a politically independent system of courts, prosecutors, and lawyers --- all of whom have to be trained in a rule of law; and the promotion of transparency in political and administrative life, including a crackdown on corruption and nepotism . . . rife in Arab history and culture, and a major cause of the economic backwardness of the Arab peoples.

 

(ii.) Why The Changes?

The simplest answer: the war on terrorism. In particular, the 9/11 massacres underscored, by a variety of evidence cited in the earlier articles, how widespread the support for militant Islamist fundamentalism in the Arab countries and wider Muslim world happens to be . . . including admiration for bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

Something needs to be done to reverse this support. In the Bush administration, the key premise behind this radically new US policy is the close connection in the Arab and wider Muslim world --- brought out by survey data in different polls over the last 2.5 years --- between a country's degree of autocracy and economic failure, on one side, and support for militant fundamentalist Islam and terrorism in the population. As the recent Pew Survey of Global Attitudes showed, a large majority or plurality in the Muslim countries surveyed except in democratic and secular Turkey admired bin Laden.



 

(iii.) More Evidence of the Need for Change

There is other survey evidence too. A secret Saudi poll, administered shortly after 9/11 and leaked to the western media, found that 95% of Saudi men between 25 and 41 years of age admired bin Laden. That was the fall of 2001. A few months later, a Gallup Poll taken in 9 Arab countries showed that 60% of those queried denied that Muslims had even been involved in the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington D.C. In September 2002 --- a good year after 9/11 --- a Gallup poll in Egypt found that a majority of the people continued to deny that Muslims had carried out the terrorist attacks.

Turkey, to repeat, is the big exception. Note, however, the difference in the support for bin Laden in Morocco as opposed to Jordan, never mind Pakistan (too bad other Muslim and Arab countries weren't surveyed). No surprise. As we'll see, Morocco --- a moderate despotism --- has better democratic prospects than almost all the other Arab countries.

The series on the prospects of democratic change in the Middle East --- promoting which is now an official US policy, outlined in the State of the Union address this January and in other presidential speeches --- resumes its overall argument here. So far, two articles on the topic have been published; their main points are summarized in Part One just below, along with some new substantive comments. A fourth and fifth article will complete the series.

Note that this is final version of the current article, preceded by two earlier and shorter ones.

Part One: INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

The Radical Shift in US Policies Toward the Arab States

The first article in this mini-series set out and documented the radical changes in US policy toward the Arab dictators, 22 in all as late as late year, just before the fall of Saddamite Iraq's cruel totalitarian rule. Twenty-two, as it happens, is also the number of Arab states . . . each and every one, before April 2003, autocratic, dependent ultimately on secret-police rule; and each and every one corrupt, nepotistic, and repressive of human and civil rights, with some variation; nothing else. Each and every one, come to that, a failure in economic development too . . . with the total non-oil exports of the 22 Arab states adding up to 300 million people less than that of tiny Finland, whose population is 4 million. Nor is it accidental, amid an eruptive demographic rate, that illiteracy is higher in the Arab countries than anywhere else on the globe, including poorer Tropical Africa. Unemployment among men alone seems to average somewhere between 20-30%. Even in oil-rich Saudi Arabia, the per capita income is now one-third of what it was 20 years ago.

Small wonder, amid these circumstances, that there is widespread admiration for bin Laden and other terrorist leaders . . . the survey evidence here brought out in the previous buggy article.

So far, President Bush's rhetoric and that of other members in the administration in announcing a full-tilt change in US policies toward the dictators have been matched by concrete behavior: above all, clear public criticism of traditional US allies like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Tunisia, never mind brutal police-states like Syria. At the same time, the State Department --- after consultations with NATO allies and some Arab governments --- is putting the finishing touches on an important formal policy statement that is scheduled to be made public this coming June at the G-8 meeting in the state of Georgia.

So far, so good.

 

Iraq The Key

What remains pivotal in the democratic prospects of the Arab world is Iraq, and the outcome of its current political and economic changes. Will it complete the transformation, under Coalition authority, into a hoped-for consensual government with a free media and relatively honest democratic elections?

If it does, then the spillover effects --- mostly turbulent, washing over the Arab dictatorships in the region, and having little to do per se with US diplomacy --- are likely to be powerful and sustained, lasting for decades. Remember, decades. And mainly benign, at any rate in the long run.

For the time being, or the near future --- say the next decade or two --- little else can be expected to occur in Iraq beyond laying the foundations for a consensual government, with relatively honest elections and, over time, the emergence of a rule of law and a bottom-up form of civil society. That's at best. Anyone expecting Danish or New Zealand or Polish democracy is slated to be disappointed for the first decade, maybe longer. But will it actually materialize, this planned sovereign Iraq --- unified, with a federal constitution, shared power, and relatively honest elections?

 

Right Now, The Outcome Isn't Clear

In truth, it never has been. But if we crush the insurgents and terrorists now --- decisively --- then Iraq's future will look fairly bright.

At present, the main challenges are to deal effectively with Sunni malcontents (aided by foreign terrorists) and a disaffected Shiite warlord and his militia. No surprise really. As the June 30th deadline approaches --- a formal transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi government, itself transitional and obligated to draw up a formal constitution to be submitted to the Iraqi people --- we have to expect even more desperate eruptions from terrorists and other warlord and tribal-clan leaders maneuvering in typical Arab fashion for power like those of Muqtada al-Sadr, the self-anointed demagogic leader of a small faction and heavily armed militia that should never have been allowed to grow.

A showdown is in the offing, and probably with all the armed militias of a radical violent nature . . . starting with Sadr's rag-tag of terrorists and hopped-up wannabe martyrs, at least in their incendiary rhetoric --- a toxic mix, according to an academic adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, "of Islamist and nationalist slogans in a bid to conquer power." A showdown is also unfolding in Fallujah in the Sunni triangle, with determined Marines, along with armor and helicopter support, going in for a climatic battle with Saddamite die-hards and foreign terrorists. About time. These militias should never have been tolerated. They should have been put down with decisive force months ago.

 

Part Two: DON'T SHOW WEAKNESS WHEN CHALLENGED VIOLENTLY IN THE ARAB WORLD

Power Struggles in Iraq: Sunni Insurgents, Foreign Terrorists, Shiite Militias

In not dealing effectively in the past with these militias and their firebrand demagogic leaders --- and especially Sadr's brutal murder of 4 Americans last week in Fallujah --- we looked weak and timid, always a bad thing to do in the Arab world. That world is pervaded by notions of honor, shame, and revenge --- plus a lengthy tradition, 1400 years old, of winner-take-all-politics . . . no power sharing; period. Do you remember the scene in Black Hawk Dawn when an associate henchman of the warlord Addid tells the captured American helicopter pilot,

"In Somalia, killing is negotiating. Without total victory, there can be no peace. There will always be killing. That is how things are done here"?

Well, consider it a moment or two, this little bit of folk-wisdom. Change Somalia to the Arab states --- Somalia itself Muslim but not Arab --- and you'll have a good idea nonetheless of the political beliefs and practices widely understood everywhere in the Arab world.

Fourteen centuries stand behind those beliefs and practices, part of inherited cultural life.

To clarify briefly: over those 1400 years --- above the tribal level anyway --- power hasn't been shared. It's either absolute --- whether Arab, Ottoman imperial, or European colonial, or again Arab after 1918 --- or been fragmented into various competing territorial units below the level of contemporary states: armed tribal-clans, distinct and armed cities under one ruler, and so on. Either way, no traditions of legal opposition ever emerged. In such conditions, all opposition has invariably been conspiratorial: either it's crushed, the usual fate, or it manages now and then to succeed --- but only by means of assassination or a coup. Violence is endemic here. So is conspiracy. And so are efforts to pounce on the slightest sign of weakness.

Most of the time, the strong-arm despot dies peacefully in bed no matter how wretched or brutal his rule: power then passes to a son, but note: the succession for papa's autocratic power has frequently set off a series of bloody palace intrigues between competing sons, only one of whom will emerge victorious. The others will have either submitted, be killed off, or gone into exile. Alternatively, one of the conspiratorial groups manages to bump off the sitting despot --- whether Arab, Mameluke, Ottoman, or European (think of the Algerian revolution) --- and, if need be, defeats his henchmen, seizing power for itself. What happens then? Nothing; anyway, as far as the nature of power and rule go. Only the names of the victors and the new autocrat change. Otherwise, the same winner-take-all politics and spoils persist; corruption, tribal-clan networks, and a wider clientelism of a few privileged elites invariably endure. "In Somalia [and the nearby Arab world], killing is negotiating. Without total victory, there can be no peace. There will always be killing. That is how things are done here."

Until now anyway, with a prospect of rupture in these traditions now unfolding in Iraq.  

 

The Moral For Us

That moral is simple and straightforward: in the face of violent challenges in the Arab world, the slightest concessions can be taken as a sign of fear, leading to more assaults. [For a very good article on this, see Ralph Peters, a military specialist now in the Middle East.

Fortunately, it's not too late. The violent uprising of these militias --- in Sadr's case, probably no more than a few hundred thugs, foreign terrorists, and some fervent martyr-types --- have to be put down and crushed once and for all. If they are, then the changes under way in Iraq --- a new constitution, a new free media, political parties organizing on the ground, an improved infrastructure, and a transition of sovereignty to a constituent government of some sort this summer --- will work out. If not, well . . .

Sidebar Clarification: Showing the appearance of weakness is what happened to Israel when the Labour Party ruled under Prime Minister Barak in May 2000: preparing for the conclusion of the Oslo Peace Process, the Israeli government hastily withdrew from Southern Lebanon. The results were disastrous.

Hezbollah, which Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage dubbed an even worse threat two years ago than Al Qaeda, immediately claimed a victory. That scent of Israeli weakness then encouraged the Arafat PA to stage the new Palestinian uprising starting four months later in September 2000 . . . all this even as the Israeli Cabinet continued, blithely, to negotiate seriously and eventually sign the US-mediated final Accord, a follow-up to the Camp David Accords, after Camp David, in December 2000 that was remarkably generous. To the dismay of our chief envoy and main mediator, Dennis Ross, though Barak signed the Accord setting up a new Palestinian state --- with 95-97% of the West Bank, all of Gaza, a connecting corridor created from inside Israeli boundaries to both --- plus shared rule over Jerusalem, the dismantling of all Israeli settlements save those next to Jerusalem itself, and $30 billion or more for Palestinian refugees --- Arafat ignored the advice of many of the PA negotiators, rejected the Accord, and never explained its terms to his people



That brings us to a key question:

 

Is The Yugoslav Example Relevant to Iraq?

This will be a fairly straightforward article, with two key links --- both to articles published at Frontpage online in the last few days. It deals with the assaults on free speech and civility on campus practiced by certain politically correct students, including, it appears, a fair number of foreign students from the Middle East.

The argument is then fleshed out with some added comments about Middle East Studies in this country, Saudi influence, the ideological and scholarly travesties that mark the Middle East Studies Establishment --- full of self-deception before 9/11 about militant Islamist fundamentalisms (seen as heralding democracy in the Arab world) --- and the mainstream scholarly inability in that discipline, dominated by politically correct types and political agendas, to come to terms with Islamist terrorism ever since. No, not just before 9/11; in the nearly 3 years after it. Such is the set of delusive, self-conning views toward Islamist fundamentalisms, and what inspires the militant frenzied terrorism that feeds on them, in these bankrupt scholarly circles, enjoying US tax dollars for their research . . . never mind, continued Saudi thug-o-cratic largesse.

(i.) INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

The Evidence for These Claims?

You'll find it in a few moments. For the time being, note that a good year after 9/11's massacres in the fall of 2002, the members of the Middle East Studies Association assembled for their annual conclave, at which hundreds of papers were read. Only two dealt with terrorism, and then obliquely, with the term put in quotation marks. Don't want to upset the terrorists, you see; victims, apparently, of American imperialism. Believe it or not, our tax money goes to support the research of many of these politically activist in scholarly garb.

 

Other Failures



Meanwhile, as another point totally inexplicable for most Middle East scholars, the bulk of Arabs go on admiring bin Laden and apparently other forms of mass-killing Arab terrorist movements besides Al Qaeda --- something brought out by survey data in the previous buggy article.

Nor is that all. A Gallup poll in February 2002 even found that 60% of Arabs in 9 countries, roughly 2 out of 3 Arabs, denied that Muslims were involved in the 9/11 massacres. Who were the culprits then? Any buggy visitor knows the answer by now. Conspiratorial paranoia, it seems, is part and parcel of the standard Arab world-view, now suffused with viciously racist anti-Semitism of the Nazi sort now diffused throughout the Arab street and part of popular culture . . . with the conflict of civilizations between modernizers and regressive, terrorist-supporting Islamist movements raging everywhere in the Muslim world, and especially the Middle East.

Not that any of the stellar members of the Middle East Studies Association ever foresaw this conflict, or for that matter, have acknowledged it today . . . any more, than they can explain, given their shallow apologetics and tunnel vision, the hate-charged conspiratorial style that marks the majority outlook in the Arab world. By contrast, the older guard of Middle East scholars like the great Bernard Lewis (cited below) foresaw all these twisted mental developments, marked by rage and a sense of pervasive humiliation in the Arab world. Come to that, scholars like Martin Kramer, Fouad Ajami, Kanan Makiya, Fatima Mernissi, and Daniel Pipes --- all outside the mainstream of Middle East Studies, in the era of Saudi bribe money and politically correct agendas --- have written at length on these topics, both before and after 9/11, in waves of brilliant lumious light. So has a gifted journalist and novelist, who lived in Morocco has a child, David Pryce Jones --- above all, in The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs (reprinted in 2002). So has Stanley Kurz of the Hoover Institute at Stanford, a link to whose writings will soon follow.

 

The Blind Leading the Blind

Read the mainstream Middle East Studies stuff from 1980 on, or even after 9/11's massacres, and you'd be in the dark about militant Islamism --- and its fervent support for terrorism, plus the conspiratorial paranoid style in Arab life and the conflicts between modernizers and regressive fundamentalisms in the Middle East. You'd also be in the dark, stumbling around in a cumulative mental murk, when it comes to grasping how and why the ubiquitous, thoroughly corrupt Arab dictators have exploited both movements for their own self-serving ends. Nor is that all. Ask the mainstreamers for shafts of light on the raging Nazi-like anti-Semitism in the Arab world, and you'd be like a person stuck in the basement of a skyscraper when the electricity went out. Forever.

For one well known example, consider the president of the Middle East Studies Association in 2002, Joel Beinen of Stanford. A left-wing radical whose views are close to Noam Chomsky's, he had published a well-known reader called Political Islam in 1997; in his introduction, Beinin scoffed at the notion that radical Islamisms posed any threat to the US. Those who claimed this were, he said, tools of US imperialism, part of the campaign to spread the "evil empire." According to one of Beinin's well-known dissenting opponents, Stanley Kurz. of the Hoover Institute, in the whole 375 pages of the reader on radical Islam, "there is next to nothing about Islamic terrorism,"

So this is the man who America's scholars of the Middle East have chosen to lead them — a man who explains the events of September 11 by pointing to American foreign policy; a man who would cut off aid to Israel; a man who belittled those who were prescient enough to perceive a threat from Islamic extremists long before 9/11 (scholars like Kramer and Pipes); a man who has seriously questioned America's policy of opposition to a government in Iran that is obviously an adversary of this country; and a man who continues to embrace utopian Marxism, long after that dream has been revealed as a sham. This is the man who has the gall to demand that he and his supporters be given a special government subsidy on grounds of "national interest



Then read these other scholars just mentioned, and guess what: floods of glittering light everywhere . . . like Broadway at night. You'd be enlightened and not surprised at the existence of Al Qaeda and other mass-murdering Islamist terrorisms; you'd know the reasons why these blood-soaked terrorists evoke so much admiration in the Arab world and elsewhere in parts of Islam; you'd also be thoroughly familiar with the double-dealing antics of the Kings, Sheiks, and Presidents-Elect For Life throughout the Middle East. As for the conspiratorial style, now rife in Arab popular culture, consider the latest outrages of Nazi-like racism featured in a Syrian TV series to widespread acclamation. A similar series ran on Egyptian television last year.

You wouldn't be surprised at this rampant racism and how and why it flourishes. Read the mainstreamers, including Beinin, and you'd be lucky if you would even find a mention of this. No exaggeration. Even a brief reference in passing.

 

Latest Buggy Mini-Series Hanging Fire

Note, finally, that we'll return tomorrow or the day after to the mini-series, 4 articles in all, on the new US initiative to push for democracy in the Middle East. Two articles have appeared so far the last week or so. The third, to repeat, will appear shortly, and the fourth will then follow.

 

(ii.) STUDENT THUGS AT UC SANTA BARBARA

The first article, written by an Arab-American journalist, unfolds a commentary I can vouch for personally: it documents the efforts of a group of totalitarian-like students, including foreign ones from the Middle East, who tried to shout down and disrupt a recent speech given by a well-known Italian Muslim Sheik at UC Santa Barbara. See The Islamist Muzzle, April 4, 2004. His offense in their eyes? He has blasted Islamist extremism, fundamentalist intolerance, and Islamist and other support for Muslim terrorisms of all sort.

That disruptive campaign occurred recently. Several of the students who were at the meeting, seeking enlightenment, were in my winter class, political science 129, which dealt with the war on terrorism. Their summary of the meeting and the thuggish, Red-Guard efforts of the catcallers and fist-shaking hooligans chimes with the Frontpage article.

Note that lots of the thuggish protestors --- maybe most --- were foreign students. To the extent that they engaged in these thuggish, totalitarian tactics --- widely used by the Nazis back in the late 1920s and early 1930s before Hitler came to power in 1933, the Nazi student movement dominating German universities in that period on the student level --- I myself would not hesitate to report them to the university authorities for punishment and for that matter to the INS. The motive here should be obvious. Either foreign students, like all students, respect the rights of free speech and the need for civility on campus and elsewhere in this country, or they should be deported. Period.

 

(iii.) SAUDI BRIBE MONEY AND MIDDLE EAST STUDIES AT UC AND ELSEWHERE

The other Frontpage article, The Saudi Fifth Column on Our Nation's Campuses, documents the extent to which the Saudi Mafioso-like royal family --- headed by 4000 princes who have squandered trillions of dollars worth of oil revenue on their non-stop orgies of luxuriously conspicuous consumption --- have sought energetically, for decades, to use some of that fabulous revenue to export their extremist versions of Wahhabi Islam around the world . . . not least to US universities, mainly by setting up chairs and establishing Middle East Studies Institutes. All, of course --- these wonderfully philanthropic benefactors --- for the sake of joyful learning, nothing else.

 

Saudi Generosity Examined