Saturday, March 19, 2005
What's Left? Shame.
By Charles KrauthammerFriday, March 18, 2005; Page A23
At his news conference on Wednesday, President Bush declined an invitation to claim vindication for his policy of spreading democracy in the Middle East. After two years of attacks on him as a historical illiterate pursuing the childish fantasy of Middle East democracy, he was entitled to claim a bit of credit. Yet he declined, partly out of modesty (as with Ronald Reagan, one of the secrets of his political success) and partly because he has learned the perils of declaring any mission accomplished.
The democracy project is, of course, just beginning. We do not yet know whether the Middle East today is Europe 1989 or Europe 1848. In 1989 we saw the swift collapse of the Soviet empire; in 1848 there was a flowering of liberal revolutions throughout Europe that, within a short time, were all suppressed.
Nonetheless, 1848 did presage the coming of the liberal idea throughout Europe. (By 1871, it had been restored to France, for example.) It marked a turning point from which there was no going back. The Arab Spring of 2005 will be noted by history as a similar turning point for the Arab world.
We do not yet know, however, whether this initial flourishing of democracy will succeed. The Syrian and Iraqi Baathists, their jihadist allies, and the various regional autocrats are quite determined to suppress it. But we do know one thing: Those who claimed, with great certainty, that Arabs are an exception to the human tendency toward freedom, that they live in a stunted and distorted culture that makes them love their chains -- and that the notion the United States could help trigger a democratic revolution by militarily deposing their oppressors was a fantasy -- have been proved wrong.
As an advocate of that notion of democratic revolution, I am not surprised that the opposing view was proved false. I am surprised only that it was proved false so quickly -- that the voters in Iraq, the people of Lebanon, the women of Kuwait, the followers of Ayman Nour in Egypt would rise so eagerly at the first breaking of the dictatorial "stability" they had so long experienced (and we had so long supported) to claim their democratic rights.
This amazing display has prompted a wave of soul-searching. When a Le Monde editorial titled "Arab Spring" acknowledges "the merit of George W. Bush," when the cover headline of London's The Independent is "Was Bush Right After All?" and when a column in Der Spiegel asks "Could George W. Bush Be Right?" you know that something radical has happened.
It is not just that the ramparts of Euro-snobbery have been breached. Iraq and, more broadly, the Bush doctrine were always more than a purely intellectual matter. The left's patronizing, quasi-colonialist view of the benighted Arabs was not just analytically incorrect. It was morally bankrupt, too.
After all, going back at least to the Spanish Civil War, the left has always prided itself on being the great international champion of freedom and human rights. And yet, when America proposed to remove the man responsible for torturing, gassing and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, the left suddenly turned into a champion of Westphalian sovereign inviolability.
A leftist judge in Spain orders the arrest of a pathetic, near-senile Gen. Augusto Pinochet eight years after he's left office, and becomes a human rights hero -- a classic example of the left morally grandstanding in the name of victims of dictatorships long gone. Yet for the victims of contemporary monsters still actively killing and oppressing -- Khomeini and his successors, the Assads of Syria and, until yesterday, Hussein and his sons -- nothing. No sympathy. No action. Indeed, virulent hostility to America's courageous and dangerous attempt at rescue.
The international left's concern for human rights turns out to be nothing more than a useful weapon for its anti-Americanism. Jeane Kirkpatrick pointed out this selective concern for the victims of U.S. allies (such as Chile) 25 years ago. After the Cold War, the hypocrisy continues. For which Arab people do European hearts burn? The Palestinians. Why? Because that permits the vilification of Israel -- an outpost of Western democracy and, even worse, a staunch U.S. ally. Championing suffering Iraqis, Syrians and Lebanese offers no such satisfaction. Hence, silence.
Until now. Now that the real Arab street has risen to claim rights that the West takes for granted, the left takes note. It is forced to acknowledge that those brutish Americans led by their simpleton cowboy might have been right. It has no choice. It is shamed. A Lebanese, amid a sea of a million other Lebanese, raises a placard reading "Thank you, George W. Bush," and all that Euro-pretense, moral and intellectual, collapses.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
By Charles KrauthammerFriday, March 18, 2005; Page A23
At his news conference on Wednesday, President Bush declined an invitation to claim vindication for his policy of spreading democracy in the Middle East. After two years of attacks on him as a historical illiterate pursuing the childish fantasy of Middle East democracy, he was entitled to claim a bit of credit. Yet he declined, partly out of modesty (as with Ronald Reagan, one of the secrets of his political success) and partly because he has learned the perils of declaring any mission accomplished.
The democracy project is, of course, just beginning. We do not yet know whether the Middle East today is Europe 1989 or Europe 1848. In 1989 we saw the swift collapse of the Soviet empire; in 1848 there was a flowering of liberal revolutions throughout Europe that, within a short time, were all suppressed.
Nonetheless, 1848 did presage the coming of the liberal idea throughout Europe. (By 1871, it had been restored to France, for example.) It marked a turning point from which there was no going back. The Arab Spring of 2005 will be noted by history as a similar turning point for the Arab world.
We do not yet know, however, whether this initial flourishing of democracy will succeed. The Syrian and Iraqi Baathists, their jihadist allies, and the various regional autocrats are quite determined to suppress it. But we do know one thing: Those who claimed, with great certainty, that Arabs are an exception to the human tendency toward freedom, that they live in a stunted and distorted culture that makes them love their chains -- and that the notion the United States could help trigger a democratic revolution by militarily deposing their oppressors was a fantasy -- have been proved wrong.
As an advocate of that notion of democratic revolution, I am not surprised that the opposing view was proved false. I am surprised only that it was proved false so quickly -- that the voters in Iraq, the people of Lebanon, the women of Kuwait, the followers of Ayman Nour in Egypt would rise so eagerly at the first breaking of the dictatorial "stability" they had so long experienced (and we had so long supported) to claim their democratic rights.
This amazing display has prompted a wave of soul-searching. When a Le Monde editorial titled "Arab Spring" acknowledges "the merit of George W. Bush," when the cover headline of London's The Independent is "Was Bush Right After All?" and when a column in Der Spiegel asks "Could George W. Bush Be Right?" you know that something radical has happened.
It is not just that the ramparts of Euro-snobbery have been breached. Iraq and, more broadly, the Bush doctrine were always more than a purely intellectual matter. The left's patronizing, quasi-colonialist view of the benighted Arabs was not just analytically incorrect. It was morally bankrupt, too.
After all, going back at least to the Spanish Civil War, the left has always prided itself on being the great international champion of freedom and human rights. And yet, when America proposed to remove the man responsible for torturing, gassing and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, the left suddenly turned into a champion of Westphalian sovereign inviolability.
A leftist judge in Spain orders the arrest of a pathetic, near-senile Gen. Augusto Pinochet eight years after he's left office, and becomes a human rights hero -- a classic example of the left morally grandstanding in the name of victims of dictatorships long gone. Yet for the victims of contemporary monsters still actively killing and oppressing -- Khomeini and his successors, the Assads of Syria and, until yesterday, Hussein and his sons -- nothing. No sympathy. No action. Indeed, virulent hostility to America's courageous and dangerous attempt at rescue.
The international left's concern for human rights turns out to be nothing more than a useful weapon for its anti-Americanism. Jeane Kirkpatrick pointed out this selective concern for the victims of U.S. allies (such as Chile) 25 years ago. After the Cold War, the hypocrisy continues. For which Arab people do European hearts burn? The Palestinians. Why? Because that permits the vilification of Israel -- an outpost of Western democracy and, even worse, a staunch U.S. ally. Championing suffering Iraqis, Syrians and Lebanese offers no such satisfaction. Hence, silence.
Until now. Now that the real Arab street has risen to claim rights that the West takes for granted, the left takes note. It is forced to acknowledge that those brutish Americans led by their simpleton cowboy might have been right. It has no choice. It is shamed. A Lebanese, amid a sea of a million other Lebanese, raises a placard reading "Thank you, George W. Bush," and all that Euro-pretense, moral and intellectual, collapses.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
Thursday, March 17, 2005
This Was Not Looting
How did Saddam's best weapons plants get plundered?
By Christopher Hitchens Posted Tuesday, March 15, 2005, at 5:29 AM PT
Once again, a major story gets top billing in a mainstream paper—and is printed upside down. "Looting at Weapons Plants Was Systematic, Iraqi Says." This was how the New York Times led its front page on Sunday. According to the supporting story, Dr. Sami al-Araji, the deputy minister of industry, says that after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, "looters systematically dismantled and removed tons of machinery from Saddam Hussein's most important weapons installations, including some with high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms."
As printed, the implication of the story was not dissimilar from the Al-Qaqaa disclosures, which featured so much in the closing days of the presidential election last fall. In that case, a huge stock of conventional high-explosives had been allowed to go missing and was presumably in the hands of those who were massacring Iraqi civilians and killing coalition troops. At least one comment from the Bush campaign surrogate appeared to blame this negligence on the troops themselves. Followed to one possible conclusion, the implication was clear: The invasion of Iraq had made the world a more dangerous place by randomly scattering all sorts of weaponry, including mass-destruction weaponry, to destinations unknown.
It was eye-rubbing to read of the scale of this potential new nightmare. There in cold print was the Al Hatteen "munitions production plant that international inspectors called a complete potential nuclear weapons laboratory." And what of the Al Adwan facility, which "produced equipment used for uranium enrichment, necessary to make some kinds of nuclear weapons"? The overall pattern of the plundered sites was summarized thus, by reporters James Glanz and William J. Broad:
The kinds of machinery at the various sites included equipment that could be used to make missile parts, chemical weapons or centrifuges essential for enriching uranium for atom bombs.
My first question is this: How can it be that, on every page of every other edition for months now, the New York Times has been stating categorically that Iraq harbored no weapons of mass destruction? And there can hardly be a comedy-club third-rater or MoveOn.org activist in the entire country who hasn't stated with sarcastic certainty that the whole WMD fuss was a way of lying the American people into war. So now what? Maybe we should have taken Saddam's propaganda seriously, when his newspaper proudly described Iraq's physicists as "our nuclear mujahideen."
My second question is: What's all this about "looting"? The word is used throughout the long report, but here's what it's used to describe. "In four weeks from mid-April to mid-May of 2003 … teams with flatbed trucks and other heavy equipment moved systematically from site to site. … 'The first wave came for the machines,' Dr Araji said. 'The second wave, cables and cranes.' " Perhaps hedging the bet, the Times authors at this point refer to "organized looting."
But obviously, what we are reading about is a carefully planned military operation. The participants were not panicked or greedy civilians helping themselves—which is the customary definition of a "looter," especially in wartime. They were mechanized and mobile and under orders, and acting in a concerted fashion. Thus, if the story is factually correct—which we have no reason at all to doubt—then Saddam's Iraq was a fairly highly-evolved WMD state, with a contingency plan for further concealment and distribution of the weaponry in case of attack or discovery.
Before the war began, several of the administration's critics argued that an intervention would be too dangerous, either because Saddam Hussein would actually unleash his arsenal of WMD, or because he would divert it to third parties. That case at least had the merit of being serious (though I would want to argue that a regime capable of doing either thing was a regime that urgently needed to be removed). Since then, however, the scene has dissolved into one long taunt and jeer: "There were no WMD in Iraq. Liar, liar, pants on fire."
The U.N. inspectors, who are solemnly quoted by Glanz and Broad as having "monitored" the alarming developments at Al Hatteen and elsewhere, don't come out looking too professional, either. If by scanning satellite pictures now they can tell us that potentially thermonuclear stuff is on the loose, how come they couldn't come up with this important data when they were supposedly "on the ground"?
Even in the worst interpretation, it seems unlikely that the material is more dangerous now than it was two years ago. Some of the elements—centrifuges, for example, and chemical mixtures—require stable and controlled conditions for effectiveness. They can't simply be transferred to some kitchen or tent. They are less risky than they were in early 2003, in other words. If they went to a neighboring state, though … Some chemical vats have apparently turned up on a scrap heap in Jordan, even if this does argue more for a panicky concealment than a plan of transfer. But anyway, this only returns us to the main point: If Saddam's people could have made such a transfer after his fall, then they could have made it much more easily during his reign. (We know, for example, that the Baathists were discussing the acquisition of long-range missiles from North Korea as late as March 2003, and at that time, the nuclear Wal-Mart of the A.Q. Khan network was still in business. Iraq would have had plenty to trade in this WMD underworld.)
Supporters of the overdue disarmament and liberation of Iraq, all the same, can't be complacent about this story. It seems flabbergasting that any of these sites were unsecured after the occupation, let alone for so long. Did the CIA yet again lack "human intelligence" as well as every other kind? The Bush administration staked the reputation of the United States on the matter. It won't do to say that "mistakes were made."
How did Saddam's best weapons plants get plundered?
By Christopher Hitchens Posted Tuesday, March 15, 2005, at 5:29 AM PT
Once again, a major story gets top billing in a mainstream paper—and is printed upside down. "Looting at Weapons Plants Was Systematic, Iraqi Says." This was how the New York Times led its front page on Sunday. According to the supporting story, Dr. Sami al-Araji, the deputy minister of industry, says that after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, "looters systematically dismantled and removed tons of machinery from Saddam Hussein's most important weapons installations, including some with high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms."
As printed, the implication of the story was not dissimilar from the Al-Qaqaa disclosures, which featured so much in the closing days of the presidential election last fall. In that case, a huge stock of conventional high-explosives had been allowed to go missing and was presumably in the hands of those who were massacring Iraqi civilians and killing coalition troops. At least one comment from the Bush campaign surrogate appeared to blame this negligence on the troops themselves. Followed to one possible conclusion, the implication was clear: The invasion of Iraq had made the world a more dangerous place by randomly scattering all sorts of weaponry, including mass-destruction weaponry, to destinations unknown.
It was eye-rubbing to read of the scale of this potential new nightmare. There in cold print was the Al Hatteen "munitions production plant that international inspectors called a complete potential nuclear weapons laboratory." And what of the Al Adwan facility, which "produced equipment used for uranium enrichment, necessary to make some kinds of nuclear weapons"? The overall pattern of the plundered sites was summarized thus, by reporters James Glanz and William J. Broad:
The kinds of machinery at the various sites included equipment that could be used to make missile parts, chemical weapons or centrifuges essential for enriching uranium for atom bombs.
My first question is this: How can it be that, on every page of every other edition for months now, the New York Times has been stating categorically that Iraq harbored no weapons of mass destruction? And there can hardly be a comedy-club third-rater or MoveOn.org activist in the entire country who hasn't stated with sarcastic certainty that the whole WMD fuss was a way of lying the American people into war. So now what? Maybe we should have taken Saddam's propaganda seriously, when his newspaper proudly described Iraq's physicists as "our nuclear mujahideen."
My second question is: What's all this about "looting"? The word is used throughout the long report, but here's what it's used to describe. "In four weeks from mid-April to mid-May of 2003 … teams with flatbed trucks and other heavy equipment moved systematically from site to site. … 'The first wave came for the machines,' Dr Araji said. 'The second wave, cables and cranes.' " Perhaps hedging the bet, the Times authors at this point refer to "organized looting."
But obviously, what we are reading about is a carefully planned military operation. The participants were not panicked or greedy civilians helping themselves—which is the customary definition of a "looter," especially in wartime. They were mechanized and mobile and under orders, and acting in a concerted fashion. Thus, if the story is factually correct—which we have no reason at all to doubt—then Saddam's Iraq was a fairly highly-evolved WMD state, with a contingency plan for further concealment and distribution of the weaponry in case of attack or discovery.
Before the war began, several of the administration's critics argued that an intervention would be too dangerous, either because Saddam Hussein would actually unleash his arsenal of WMD, or because he would divert it to third parties. That case at least had the merit of being serious (though I would want to argue that a regime capable of doing either thing was a regime that urgently needed to be removed). Since then, however, the scene has dissolved into one long taunt and jeer: "There were no WMD in Iraq. Liar, liar, pants on fire."
The U.N. inspectors, who are solemnly quoted by Glanz and Broad as having "monitored" the alarming developments at Al Hatteen and elsewhere, don't come out looking too professional, either. If by scanning satellite pictures now they can tell us that potentially thermonuclear stuff is on the loose, how come they couldn't come up with this important data when they were supposedly "on the ground"?
Even in the worst interpretation, it seems unlikely that the material is more dangerous now than it was two years ago. Some of the elements—centrifuges, for example, and chemical mixtures—require stable and controlled conditions for effectiveness. They can't simply be transferred to some kitchen or tent. They are less risky than they were in early 2003, in other words. If they went to a neighboring state, though … Some chemical vats have apparently turned up on a scrap heap in Jordan, even if this does argue more for a panicky concealment than a plan of transfer. But anyway, this only returns us to the main point: If Saddam's people could have made such a transfer after his fall, then they could have made it much more easily during his reign. (We know, for example, that the Baathists were discussing the acquisition of long-range missiles from North Korea as late as March 2003, and at that time, the nuclear Wal-Mart of the A.Q. Khan network was still in business. Iraq would have had plenty to trade in this WMD underworld.)
Supporters of the overdue disarmament and liberation of Iraq, all the same, can't be complacent about this story. It seems flabbergasting that any of these sites were unsecured after the occupation, let alone for so long. Did the CIA yet again lack "human intelligence" as well as every other kind? The Bush administration staked the reputation of the United States on the matter. It won't do to say that "mistakes were made."
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Monday, March 14, 2005
New Signs on the Arab Street
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
From Baghdad to Beirut, the Middle East has seen a series of unprecedented popular demonstrations for democracy. There were, however, two street protests in December that got virtually no coverage, but were just as important, if not more. One took place in the Egyptian Nile Delta town of Mahalla and the other in the Suez Canal city of Ismailiya. Both of these raucous Egyptian demonstrations, which involved marches, strikes, denunciations of the government and appeals to Parliament, were triggered by President Hosni Mubarak's decision to sign the first substantial trade agreement with Israel since Camp David. That decision brought Egyptian workers from both areas into the streets. They were furious. They were enraged. Why?
They were not included in the new trade deal with Israel.
Now, that's a new Middle East. On Dec. 14, Egypt, Israel and the U.S. signed an accord setting up three Qualified Industrial Zones (Q.I.Z.'s) in Egypt. The deal stipulated the following: Any Egyptian company operating in one of these Q.I.Z.'s that imports from an Israeli company at least 11.7 percent of the parts, materials or services that go into the Egyptian company's final product can then export that finished product to the U.S. duty free. This is a big deal for Egypt, which, unlike Jordan and Israel, does not have a free-trade treaty with the U.S. As part of the accord, the U.S. named Greater Cairo, Alexandria and Port Said the three Q.I.Z.'s. It had to be limited to only three municipalities so that the U.S. would not be swamped with Egyptian exports - hence the protests from the two big Egyptian manufacturing centers that were left out.
According to Rashid Mohamed Rashid, Egypt's impressive new minister of foreign trade, 397 Egyptian companies have already signed up to participate in the Q.I.Z. program, most of them small and medium-size firms. Many of these Egyptian companies have already gone to Israel to forge deals with Israeli suppliers or started work with Israeli partners to identify export markets in the U.S. Some Israeli companies are setting up shop in the Egyptian Q.I.Z.'s to provide services right on the spot.
There are a lot of messages in this bottle. One is that if you create a real opportunity for Israeli and Egyptian businesses to interact profitably, not only will Egyptians ignore the protests of the old Nasserites who want to boycott Israel, they will seize the opportunity and protest mightily if they are kept out.
Another message: This "Baghdad spring" will not blossom into sustainable democracy in any of these Arab states without a broader middle class and civil society institutions to support it. For too long, U.S. foreign policy was based on buying stability in the Arab world by supporting dictators, who destroyed all the independent press, political parties, unions, real private sector and civil society in their countries - everything except the mosque. Iraq is the starkest example of this, which is why democratization there will take time.
Looking at Eastern Europe on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, said Emanuele Ottolenghi, a lecturer on the Middle East at Oxford, "we could have predicted which countries would have an easy transition to democracy and which ones not." Countries like Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states, which had a history of liberal institutions and free markets that had been suppressed by communism, quickly flourished. Others farther east, which did not have such institutions in their past and were starting from scratch - Bulgaria, Romania and the former Soviet republics - have struggled since the fall of the wall.
The same will be true in the Middle East, where democracy will not just spring up because autocrats fall down. It will arise only if these countries develop, among other things, export-oriented private sectors, which can be the foundation for a vibrant middle class that is not dependent upon the state for contracts and has a vital interest in an open economy, a free press and its own political parties. The development of such a private sector was crucial in democratizing Taiwan and South Korea.
That is why, beyond Iraq, America's priorities should be to sign a free-trade agreement with Egypt - which would help foster an export-oriented private sector there just when President Mubarak has signaled an end to 50 years of military rule - and get Syria out of Lebanon, which would free the dynamic private sector that already exists there, but has been stifled by Syria. Free Lebanon and free Egypt's economy and they will change the rest of the Middle East for us - for free.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
From Baghdad to Beirut, the Middle East has seen a series of unprecedented popular demonstrations for democracy. There were, however, two street protests in December that got virtually no coverage, but were just as important, if not more. One took place in the Egyptian Nile Delta town of Mahalla and the other in the Suez Canal city of Ismailiya. Both of these raucous Egyptian demonstrations, which involved marches, strikes, denunciations of the government and appeals to Parliament, were triggered by President Hosni Mubarak's decision to sign the first substantial trade agreement with Israel since Camp David. That decision brought Egyptian workers from both areas into the streets. They were furious. They were enraged. Why?
They were not included in the new trade deal with Israel.
Now, that's a new Middle East. On Dec. 14, Egypt, Israel and the U.S. signed an accord setting up three Qualified Industrial Zones (Q.I.Z.'s) in Egypt. The deal stipulated the following: Any Egyptian company operating in one of these Q.I.Z.'s that imports from an Israeli company at least 11.7 percent of the parts, materials or services that go into the Egyptian company's final product can then export that finished product to the U.S. duty free. This is a big deal for Egypt, which, unlike Jordan and Israel, does not have a free-trade treaty with the U.S. As part of the accord, the U.S. named Greater Cairo, Alexandria and Port Said the three Q.I.Z.'s. It had to be limited to only three municipalities so that the U.S. would not be swamped with Egyptian exports - hence the protests from the two big Egyptian manufacturing centers that were left out.
According to Rashid Mohamed Rashid, Egypt's impressive new minister of foreign trade, 397 Egyptian companies have already signed up to participate in the Q.I.Z. program, most of them small and medium-size firms. Many of these Egyptian companies have already gone to Israel to forge deals with Israeli suppliers or started work with Israeli partners to identify export markets in the U.S. Some Israeli companies are setting up shop in the Egyptian Q.I.Z.'s to provide services right on the spot.
There are a lot of messages in this bottle. One is that if you create a real opportunity for Israeli and Egyptian businesses to interact profitably, not only will Egyptians ignore the protests of the old Nasserites who want to boycott Israel, they will seize the opportunity and protest mightily if they are kept out.
Another message: This "Baghdad spring" will not blossom into sustainable democracy in any of these Arab states without a broader middle class and civil society institutions to support it. For too long, U.S. foreign policy was based on buying stability in the Arab world by supporting dictators, who destroyed all the independent press, political parties, unions, real private sector and civil society in their countries - everything except the mosque. Iraq is the starkest example of this, which is why democratization there will take time.
Looking at Eastern Europe on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, said Emanuele Ottolenghi, a lecturer on the Middle East at Oxford, "we could have predicted which countries would have an easy transition to democracy and which ones not." Countries like Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states, which had a history of liberal institutions and free markets that had been suppressed by communism, quickly flourished. Others farther east, which did not have such institutions in their past and were starting from scratch - Bulgaria, Romania and the former Soviet republics - have struggled since the fall of the wall.
The same will be true in the Middle East, where democracy will not just spring up because autocrats fall down. It will arise only if these countries develop, among other things, export-oriented private sectors, which can be the foundation for a vibrant middle class that is not dependent upon the state for contracts and has a vital interest in an open economy, a free press and its own political parties. The development of such a private sector was crucial in democratizing Taiwan and South Korea.
That is why, beyond Iraq, America's priorities should be to sign a free-trade agreement with Egypt - which would help foster an export-oriented private sector there just when President Mubarak has signaled an end to 50 years of military rule - and get Syria out of Lebanon, which would free the dynamic private sector that already exists there, but has been stifled by Syria. Free Lebanon and free Egypt's economy and they will change the rest of the Middle East for us - for free.
Sunday, March 13, 2005
WILL THE MID-EAST BLOOM?
By Youssef M. Ibrahim
The Washington Post,
Sunday, March 13, 2005; Page B01
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates
Listen to the conversations in the cafes on the edge of the creek that runs through this Persian Gulf city, and it is hard to believe that the George W. Bush being praised by Arab diners is the same George W. Bush who has been widely excoriated in these parts ever since he took office.
Yet the balmy breeze blowing along the creek carries murmurs of approval for the devoutly Christian U.S. president, whose persistent calls for democracy in the Middle East are looking less like preaching and more like timely encouragement.
Nowadays, intellectuals, businessmen and working-class people alike can be caught lauding Bush's hard-edged posture on democracy and cheering his handling of Arab rulers who are U.S. allies. Many also admire Bush's unvarnished threats against Syria should it fail to pull its soldiers and spies out of Lebanon before the elections there next month -- a warning the United Nations reinforced last week with immediate effects. For Bush, it is not quite a lovefest but a celebration nonetheless.
"His talk about democracy is good," an Egyptian-born woman was telling companions at the Fatafeet (or "Crumbs") restaurant the other night, exuberant enough for her voice to carry to neighboring tables. "He keeps hitting this nail. That's good, by God, isn't it?" At another table, a Lebanese man was waxing enthusiastic over Bush's blunt and irreverent manner toward Arab autocrats. "It is good to light a fire under their feet," he said.
From Casablanca to Kuwait City, the writings of newspaper columnists and the chatter of pundits on Arabic language satellite television suggest a change in climate for advocates of human rights, constitutional reforms, business transparency, women's rights and limits on power. And while developments differ vastly from country to country, their common feature is a lifting -- albeit a tentative one -- of the fear that has for decades constricted the Arab mind.
Regardless of Bush's intentions -- which many Arabs and Muslims still view with suspicion -- the U.S. president and his neoconservative crowd are helping to spawn a spirit of reform and a new vigor to confront dynastic dictatorships and other assorted ills. It's enough for someone like me, who has felt that Bush's attitude toward the Mideast has been all wrong, to wonder whether his idea of setting the Muslim house in order is right.
And yet, it is too early for congratulations. Bush may feel inspired by the example of President Ronald Reagan, who told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall" in Berlin, but the Middle East may more closely resemble 1989 Beijing than 1989 Berlin. While communism collapsed largely of its own weight in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union without U.S. intervention, pro-democracy demonstrators in China were squashed. What will U.S. policy in the Middle East look like if the autocrats, princes and religious fundamentalists make a stand against the voices of freedom?
That said, there have been many reasons in the past two months for Arab democrats to feel giddy.
On Jan. 9, Palestinians cast ballots in free elections where the winner did not, unlike candidates in "elections" so often held elsewhere in the region, get 99 percent of the vote. And within the late Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, younger members are calling for primaries to choose fresh candidates before July's legislative elections.
Then at the end of January, 8 million Iraqis marched to the polls, despite threats of violence, to vote for a new parliament. Since then, the winners have been negotiating and balancing legislative blocks in ways that have defied predictions of Shiite domination and which, despite continued bombings and Sunni discontent, could yet be a model of the multiparty political process.
On Feb. 10, in the veiled Saudi kingdom, royal princes let in a crack of light with the first municipal elections in 42 years. Instead of being welcomed as a step forward, the elections were sarcastically derided on Saudi Internet chat sites as Mickey Mouse exercises in which half the people -- women -- couldn't vote, and half the winners were appointed by government. In the past, this sort of brazen truth-telling wouldn't have taken place, and it shows that sham or limited elections won't satisfy people.
Above all there has been the outburst in the streets of Beirut following the Feb. 14 assassination of Lebanese leader Rafiq Hariri. The murder was, to use the phrase that Napoleon's foreign minister Talleyrand is often credited with coining, "worse than a crime; it was a blunder." It laid bare all the resentment of Syria's 30-year occupation, meddling and hit squads. The demonstrations against Syria, and even the massive counter-demonstrations last week by Hezbollah, have framed a broad and (so far) nonviolent debate on the future shape of the entire Arab world.
In the largest Arab country, Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak grudgingly announced on Feb. 26 that the constitution would be altered to allow other candidates to run for the presidency. While everyone expects Mubarak, who has ruled for 24 years, to win yet another six-year term in elections this fall at the age of 77, the Sphinx had blinked. More evidence of Bush's pressure.
The groundswell continues to spread. A few days ago, Kuwaiti women hit the streets to demand the right to vote, challenging bearded Islamist parliamentarians over what the Koran says, or does not say, about the rights of women. They won the government's support for a new proposal to parliament. The Saudis then rushed to say they would allow women to vote in the next municipal elections. It matters little whether they mean it, Saudi women heard it.
This much is real. And while many Arab democrats have been struggling for years, there is a keen sense of irony that a passionately Christian American president who has supported Israel, invaded an Arab country and presided over an occupation marred by violence might actually make a positive difference in the Muslim world. It has people here citing the Koranic verse that speaks of a catastrophe that bears good fruits.
The din of democracy talk has been amplified by satellite television, the Internet and cell phones, and that is a new wrinkle for autocratic regimes experienced at quiet repression.
Al-Jazeera, whose audience numbers in the tens of millions, gave blanket coverage of the Lebanese protests, including live interviews from Beirut's Martyrs' Square as well as debates, analysis and talk shows. CNN and BBC broadcasts seen here have also tracked the events hour by hour.
As the Beirut anti-Syria demonstrations attracted the young and the hip, their images appealed to their well-to-do, educated but usually detached peers throughout the region, triggering new interest in politics. Other governments must sense popular opinion moving because none, except Iran, has rallied to Syria's side.
The intensity of it all has drowned out, at least for now, the usual noise about alleged Israeli conspiracies, neoconservative plots and America's misadventures in Iraq.
Instead, more people are baring their souls, with little apparent fear. On Tuesday an all-women's program on al-Jazeera featured a verbal wrestling match between a veiled advocate of multiple marriages and male supremacy in Islam and several other women who swatted down her views. Even the infamous religious authority Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi of Qatar -- whose edicts range from legitimizing wife beating to the killing of foreigners in Iraq to the shunning of Christians and Jews -- has been remarkably demure on his TV show.
The slogan for this nascent people's revolt has become "Kifaya," which means "enough." It's a word that is both emphatic and vague enough to be all-encompassing yet effective: enough of autocrats, enough corruption, enough occupation, enough repression. It has acquired magical and perhaps lasting power.
A respected Egyptian analyst of the Arab condition, Abdel Moneim Said , argued in the Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq al-Awsat last Wednesday that the "Enough" movement can already claim an important achievement -- sweeping aside the tired argument that "special circumstances" preclude Arabs and Muslims from sharing universal democratic principles.
Another notable voice, Egypt's guru of Arab nationalism, author and writer Muhammad Hasanayn Haykal, has pronounced 2005 "the year of the big scare" where old assumptions crumble in the face of demands for reform.
A cartoon that appeared March 3 in a Jordanian newspaper, al-Ghad, captured the sense that the age of autocracy may be drawing to a close. Political cartoonist Emad Hajjaj drew four statues on pedestals. The one furthest to the right, Saddam Hussein, is cracking at the knees and toppling into an almost identical statue of Syrian leader Bashir Assad, which is teetering into a statue of Mubarak, who is falling into a statue whose face can't be seen.
Bush, in his inaugural address, proclaimed America's commitment to spreading democracy. "All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: The United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors," he said. "When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you."
This isn't the first time that a President Bush has encouraged Arabs to rise up against their oppressors. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush egged on Iraqi Shiites and Kurds to revolt, only to abandon them when Saddam Hussein cracked down.
The question that lingers is whether the current president's resolve will last longer than his father's. How hard will Bush pressure Mubarak, while sending terrorist suspects to him and relying on Egypt for help in Gaza? If Mubarak keeps his leading opponents in jail, if Syria keeps its intelligence network in place and uses Hezbollah as its right arm, if the extensive Saudi royal family and its fundamentalist allies cling to power, what is Bush's Plan B?
Not a single Arab ruler is a willing participant in democratic reform. Their regimes are festooned with opportunists attached to their financial and political privileges. And while the Arab media have changed, these regimes still possess the same coercive instruments that have proven effective means of control in the past.
Just as important, many of the potential forces for change are wary of going along with Western-inspired momentum. And violent extremists threaten progress made in Iraq and within the Palestinian Authority.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah is a wild card. In a speech to some 500,000 supporters who gathered under his movement's banners on Tuesday in Beirut, Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah said the real objective of the United States and Israel was to disarm and dismantle Hezbollah rather than to institutionalize democracy. While it would be better to have the heavily armed Hezbollah, which already has 12 seats in the Lebanese parliament, brought into the political process, that would be hard for the Bush administration to swallow. Hezbollah is still on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations. Will the administration be willing to make a deal?
Given the uncertainties about U.S. policy, perhaps the most pertinent question is whether the resolve of Arab reformers will prove durable and effective even without substantive U.S. support.
So one is left to wonder if this moment will last more than a moment, whether it will turn into a repeat of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall or whether it will be a reprise of the truncated Beijing Spring. The region lacks China's economic dynamism, but it also lacks a Gorbachev and his policy of perestroika.
For now, all the Middle East has are demonstrators and brave voters who, ballot by imperfect ballot, e-mail by e-mail are burying a culture of fear. And for the moment, that may be enough.
Author's e-mail: ymibrahim@seig.org
Youssef Ibrahim, a former Middle East correspondent for the New York Times and energy editor of the Wall Street Journal, is managing director of the Dubai-based Strategic Energy Investment Group, a consulting firm.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
By Youssef M. Ibrahim
The Washington Post,
Sunday, March 13, 2005; Page B01
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates
Listen to the conversations in the cafes on the edge of the creek that runs through this Persian Gulf city, and it is hard to believe that the George W. Bush being praised by Arab diners is the same George W. Bush who has been widely excoriated in these parts ever since he took office.
Yet the balmy breeze blowing along the creek carries murmurs of approval for the devoutly Christian U.S. president, whose persistent calls for democracy in the Middle East are looking less like preaching and more like timely encouragement.
Nowadays, intellectuals, businessmen and working-class people alike can be caught lauding Bush's hard-edged posture on democracy and cheering his handling of Arab rulers who are U.S. allies. Many also admire Bush's unvarnished threats against Syria should it fail to pull its soldiers and spies out of Lebanon before the elections there next month -- a warning the United Nations reinforced last week with immediate effects. For Bush, it is not quite a lovefest but a celebration nonetheless.
"His talk about democracy is good," an Egyptian-born woman was telling companions at the Fatafeet (or "Crumbs") restaurant the other night, exuberant enough for her voice to carry to neighboring tables. "He keeps hitting this nail. That's good, by God, isn't it?" At another table, a Lebanese man was waxing enthusiastic over Bush's blunt and irreverent manner toward Arab autocrats. "It is good to light a fire under their feet," he said.
From Casablanca to Kuwait City, the writings of newspaper columnists and the chatter of pundits on Arabic language satellite television suggest a change in climate for advocates of human rights, constitutional reforms, business transparency, women's rights and limits on power. And while developments differ vastly from country to country, their common feature is a lifting -- albeit a tentative one -- of the fear that has for decades constricted the Arab mind.
Regardless of Bush's intentions -- which many Arabs and Muslims still view with suspicion -- the U.S. president and his neoconservative crowd are helping to spawn a spirit of reform and a new vigor to confront dynastic dictatorships and other assorted ills. It's enough for someone like me, who has felt that Bush's attitude toward the Mideast has been all wrong, to wonder whether his idea of setting the Muslim house in order is right.
And yet, it is too early for congratulations. Bush may feel inspired by the example of President Ronald Reagan, who told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall" in Berlin, but the Middle East may more closely resemble 1989 Beijing than 1989 Berlin. While communism collapsed largely of its own weight in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union without U.S. intervention, pro-democracy demonstrators in China were squashed. What will U.S. policy in the Middle East look like if the autocrats, princes and religious fundamentalists make a stand against the voices of freedom?
That said, there have been many reasons in the past two months for Arab democrats to feel giddy.
On Jan. 9, Palestinians cast ballots in free elections where the winner did not, unlike candidates in "elections" so often held elsewhere in the region, get 99 percent of the vote. And within the late Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, younger members are calling for primaries to choose fresh candidates before July's legislative elections.
Then at the end of January, 8 million Iraqis marched to the polls, despite threats of violence, to vote for a new parliament. Since then, the winners have been negotiating and balancing legislative blocks in ways that have defied predictions of Shiite domination and which, despite continued bombings and Sunni discontent, could yet be a model of the multiparty political process.
On Feb. 10, in the veiled Saudi kingdom, royal princes let in a crack of light with the first municipal elections in 42 years. Instead of being welcomed as a step forward, the elections were sarcastically derided on Saudi Internet chat sites as Mickey Mouse exercises in which half the people -- women -- couldn't vote, and half the winners were appointed by government. In the past, this sort of brazen truth-telling wouldn't have taken place, and it shows that sham or limited elections won't satisfy people.
Above all there has been the outburst in the streets of Beirut following the Feb. 14 assassination of Lebanese leader Rafiq Hariri. The murder was, to use the phrase that Napoleon's foreign minister Talleyrand is often credited with coining, "worse than a crime; it was a blunder." It laid bare all the resentment of Syria's 30-year occupation, meddling and hit squads. The demonstrations against Syria, and even the massive counter-demonstrations last week by Hezbollah, have framed a broad and (so far) nonviolent debate on the future shape of the entire Arab world.
In the largest Arab country, Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak grudgingly announced on Feb. 26 that the constitution would be altered to allow other candidates to run for the presidency. While everyone expects Mubarak, who has ruled for 24 years, to win yet another six-year term in elections this fall at the age of 77, the Sphinx had blinked. More evidence of Bush's pressure.
The groundswell continues to spread. A few days ago, Kuwaiti women hit the streets to demand the right to vote, challenging bearded Islamist parliamentarians over what the Koran says, or does not say, about the rights of women. They won the government's support for a new proposal to parliament. The Saudis then rushed to say they would allow women to vote in the next municipal elections. It matters little whether they mean it, Saudi women heard it.
This much is real. And while many Arab democrats have been struggling for years, there is a keen sense of irony that a passionately Christian American president who has supported Israel, invaded an Arab country and presided over an occupation marred by violence might actually make a positive difference in the Muslim world. It has people here citing the Koranic verse that speaks of a catastrophe that bears good fruits.
The din of democracy talk has been amplified by satellite television, the Internet and cell phones, and that is a new wrinkle for autocratic regimes experienced at quiet repression.
Al-Jazeera, whose audience numbers in the tens of millions, gave blanket coverage of the Lebanese protests, including live interviews from Beirut's Martyrs' Square as well as debates, analysis and talk shows. CNN and BBC broadcasts seen here have also tracked the events hour by hour.
As the Beirut anti-Syria demonstrations attracted the young and the hip, their images appealed to their well-to-do, educated but usually detached peers throughout the region, triggering new interest in politics. Other governments must sense popular opinion moving because none, except Iran, has rallied to Syria's side.
The intensity of it all has drowned out, at least for now, the usual noise about alleged Israeli conspiracies, neoconservative plots and America's misadventures in Iraq.
Instead, more people are baring their souls, with little apparent fear. On Tuesday an all-women's program on al-Jazeera featured a verbal wrestling match between a veiled advocate of multiple marriages and male supremacy in Islam and several other women who swatted down her views. Even the infamous religious authority Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi of Qatar -- whose edicts range from legitimizing wife beating to the killing of foreigners in Iraq to the shunning of Christians and Jews -- has been remarkably demure on his TV show.
The slogan for this nascent people's revolt has become "Kifaya," which means "enough." It's a word that is both emphatic and vague enough to be all-encompassing yet effective: enough of autocrats, enough corruption, enough occupation, enough repression. It has acquired magical and perhaps lasting power.
A respected Egyptian analyst of the Arab condition, Abdel Moneim Said , argued in the Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq al-Awsat last Wednesday that the "Enough" movement can already claim an important achievement -- sweeping aside the tired argument that "special circumstances" preclude Arabs and Muslims from sharing universal democratic principles.
Another notable voice, Egypt's guru of Arab nationalism, author and writer Muhammad Hasanayn Haykal, has pronounced 2005 "the year of the big scare" where old assumptions crumble in the face of demands for reform.
A cartoon that appeared March 3 in a Jordanian newspaper, al-Ghad, captured the sense that the age of autocracy may be drawing to a close. Political cartoonist Emad Hajjaj drew four statues on pedestals. The one furthest to the right, Saddam Hussein, is cracking at the knees and toppling into an almost identical statue of Syrian leader Bashir Assad, which is teetering into a statue of Mubarak, who is falling into a statue whose face can't be seen.
Bush, in his inaugural address, proclaimed America's commitment to spreading democracy. "All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: The United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors," he said. "When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you."
This isn't the first time that a President Bush has encouraged Arabs to rise up against their oppressors. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush egged on Iraqi Shiites and Kurds to revolt, only to abandon them when Saddam Hussein cracked down.
The question that lingers is whether the current president's resolve will last longer than his father's. How hard will Bush pressure Mubarak, while sending terrorist suspects to him and relying on Egypt for help in Gaza? If Mubarak keeps his leading opponents in jail, if Syria keeps its intelligence network in place and uses Hezbollah as its right arm, if the extensive Saudi royal family and its fundamentalist allies cling to power, what is Bush's Plan B?
Not a single Arab ruler is a willing participant in democratic reform. Their regimes are festooned with opportunists attached to their financial and political privileges. And while the Arab media have changed, these regimes still possess the same coercive instruments that have proven effective means of control in the past.
Just as important, many of the potential forces for change are wary of going along with Western-inspired momentum. And violent extremists threaten progress made in Iraq and within the Palestinian Authority.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah is a wild card. In a speech to some 500,000 supporters who gathered under his movement's banners on Tuesday in Beirut, Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah said the real objective of the United States and Israel was to disarm and dismantle Hezbollah rather than to institutionalize democracy. While it would be better to have the heavily armed Hezbollah, which already has 12 seats in the Lebanese parliament, brought into the political process, that would be hard for the Bush administration to swallow. Hezbollah is still on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations. Will the administration be willing to make a deal?
Given the uncertainties about U.S. policy, perhaps the most pertinent question is whether the resolve of Arab reformers will prove durable and effective even without substantive U.S. support.
So one is left to wonder if this moment will last more than a moment, whether it will turn into a repeat of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall or whether it will be a reprise of the truncated Beijing Spring. The region lacks China's economic dynamism, but it also lacks a Gorbachev and his policy of perestroika.
For now, all the Middle East has are demonstrators and brave voters who, ballot by imperfect ballot, e-mail by e-mail are burying a culture of fear. And for the moment, that may be enough.
Author's e-mail: ymibrahim@seig.org
Youssef Ibrahim, a former Middle East correspondent for the New York Times and energy editor of the Wall Street Journal, is managing director of the Dubai-based Strategic Energy Investment Group, a consulting firm.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
