Spreading democracy in the middle east is a bad idea (18 sept 2007) Intelligence Squared

18 Sep 2007Minutes: 01:32:18
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Summary:
Read about the panelists debating the proposition "Spreading Democracy in the Middle East Is a Bad Idea" in the latest in the Intelligence Squared U.S. series.

SPEAKERS FOR THE MOTION

Flynt Leverett is a senior fellow and director of the Geopolitics of Energy Initiative of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. He has served as senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council, Middle East expert on the secretary of state's policy planning staff and senior analyst at the CIA.

Dimitri Simes is the founding president of The Nixon Center and publisher of its foreign policy bi-monthly magazine, The National Interest. Before the establishment of the center, Simes served as chairman of the Center for Russian and Eurasian Programs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Simes was born in Moscow and immigrated to the United States in 1973.

Shibley Telhami is the Anwar Sadat professor for peace and development at the University of Maryland, College Park, and non-resident senior fellow at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution. In 2006, he served on the Iraq Study Group as a member of the Strategic Environment Working Group.

SPEAKERS AGAINST THE MOTION

Liz Cheney is an attorney and specialist in the areas of U.S. Middle East policy and reform in the Arab world. She served most recently as principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. Her responsibilities included designing and managing U.S. government programs to promote democracy in the Arab world.

Danielle Pletka is the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Her research areas include the Middle East, South Asia, terrorism and weapons proliferation. She recently served as a member of the Task Force on the United Nations, established by the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Natan Sharansky is chairman of the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at The Shalem Center in Jerusalem. From March 2003 until May 2005, he was an Israeli minister responsible for Jerusalem, social and Jewish diaspora affairs. He also has served as the deputy prime minister of Israel. He emigrated from the Soviet Union to Israel in 1986.

MODERATOR

Robert Siegel, a senior host of NPR's award-winning evening newsmagazine All Things Considered, got started in radio news when he was a college freshman in 1964. As a host, Siegel has reported from Western Europe, Eastern Europe and Israel. Before joining All Things Considered in 1987, Siegel served for four years as director of NPR's News and Information Department.

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Additional info:
By SHIBLEY TELHAMI

Both the American project to spread democracy in the Middle East in the aftermath of Sept. 11 and the Iraq War were doomed from the outset. That's not because the Middle East is incompatible with democracy, but because the project was based on contradictions and erroneous assumptions.

Spreading democracy as a goal of American foreign policy is not new. Even in the Middle East, the administration of President George H. W. Bush pushed for democratic reform as a priority in 1989 and was instrumental in promoting elections in Jordan and elsewhere. During the first few months of the Clinton administration, Secretary of State Warren Christopher spoke of democracy and reform and raised the issue with Arab leaders.

The outcome was telling. Not only did Islamists do well in elections in Jordan and Algeria, but those countries that reformed were the most reluctant to cooperate with the United States after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. In the second case, the Clinton administration's need to rally support for the emerging Oslo agreements once again sidelined the democracy question.

But since Sept. 11, the policy of spreading democracy was sold as a strategic objective, not merely as part of spreading American values. The assumption was that the terrorism that America faced was, in part, a function of the absence of democracy in the Middle East. That this notion had little factual support mattered little. Much of the literature shows that moving from authoritarianism to democracy is unpredictable and destabilizing . Thus, it should have been clear from the outset that neither the public in America nor the public in the Middle East would see benefits that justified the course. Even worse, the very terrorism that elevated the democracy policy in America's priorities was likely to increase, as it thrives where central authority is weak and instability is widespread.

Indeed it is ironic that the three countries that were highlighted as true successes of the democracy policy—Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine—are now the subject of considerable concern and instability. But there is more about the troubling dynamics in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia where something else worked against the spread of democracy.

At the same time that the United States asked governments to reform, it also asked them to support policies in Iraq, the fight against terrorism and the Arab-Israeli issue that the majority of their publics opposed. Most could not resist America's requests, but in the process they felt even more insecure as their public grew angry, and they unleashed the security services to prevent revolts—even as they held limited elections. It is not surprising that in every public opinion poll I have conducted since 2003 most Arabs believed that the Middle East had become even less democratic than it was before the Iraq War.

The Arab governments' view that the advocacy of democracy was instrumental in this was matched by a similar view among the public. Public opinion polls in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon have shown consistently that fewer than 10 percent of Arabs believe that the spread of democracy was a true American objective, with most believing that oil, Israel and weakening the Muslim world drive American policy in the region. This was true even before anarchy spread in Iraq, but the latter, coupled with revelations of scandals, such as the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, only reinforced the public perceptions. The seeming rejection of the outcome of Palestinian elections once Hamas won and the feeling that America is doing little to end the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza have added to Arab skepticism.

It isn't that Arabs have substantially different views of democracy. When asked to name the countries they believe have the most democracy and freedom for their people, all their top choices are Western, democratic countries, including the United States. When they are asked to choose countries outside their own where they would like to live or study, most select Western countries, not China or Pakistan. In the end, most Arabs, like others, want freedom and a system in which their voices count. But even more, they want security for their families, and they reject foreign occupation and anarchy. The very American policy that was said to be aimed at spreading democracy increased the conditions that terrify the public and reduced the attraction of democracy itself. If Iraq is an example of the democratic change one can expect, who, anywhere, would want it?

Source

Shibley Telhami is the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland and Senior Fellow at the Saban Center of the Brookings Institution. This article is based on an article that appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of Dissent. Mr. Telhami will debate this topic as part of the Intelligence Squared US debate series.