Mere
months ago, devotees of President George W. Bush’s
Iraq adventure were positively giddy. Not only were
they convinced that Iraq was on the fast track to
peace, prosperity and perpetual friendliness with
Washington, they believed that countries across
the Greater Middle East were following close behind.
Neo-conservative pundits openly awarded Bush credit
for the “Arab spring” that bloomed in Lebanon and
Egypt shortly after thousands of Iraqi voters and
scores of Congressional Republicans waved purple
fingers at the cameras. “Three cheers for the Bush
doctrine,” Charles Krauthammer titled his column
in Time on March 14. He continued: “It was
not people power that set this in motion. It was
American power. People power followed.”
Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice experienced an “emotional
high” of her own while speaking at the American
University in Cairo on June 20. Invoking the abolitionist
and civil rights struggles in the US, she declared
that, in Egypt and across the Middle East, “the
fear of free choices can no longer justify the denial
of liberty.” “It was important for an American official
to give that speech in the heart of the Arab world,”
Rice beamed at interviewers later. Autocratic leaders
and long-suffering peoples alike needed to know
that henceforth the US would stand with the latter
against the former, Saddam Hussein being the case
in point.
So
disciples of the Bush doctrine must have found it
jarring to open the August 14, 2005 Washington
Post and read a “senior official involved in
policy since the 2003 invasion” quoted as saying:
“What we expected to achieve was never realistic
given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground.
We are in a process of absorbing the factors of
the situation we’re in and shedding the unreality
that dominated at the beginning.”
Thus
did the official explain to the Post why,
in the oft-quoted words of the headline writers,
the United States has “lowered [its] sights on what
can be achieved in Iraq.” Historians may date the
retreat of the formerly ebullient Bush administration
into what one of its spokesmen once disparaged as
“the reality-based community” to the publication
of this article. Therein unnamed officials acknowledge,
among other things long understood by the reality-based
among us, that no constitution written by the US-backed
transitional government will resemble the document
of the neo-conservatives’ dreams and that no milestone
for the US-sponsored political transition will mark
the end of the Iraqi insurgency. Surely the administration
will not want to tout such an Iraq as a model for
the region.
What
gives with all this absorbing of factors and shedding
of unreality? How did the soaring cadences of June
lapse into the plodding bureaucratese of August?
In some right-wing circles, there is grumbling about
a slide from unadulterated neo-conservatism into
the “practical idealism” attributed to Rice. Did
the true believers vote for Bush and get John Kerry’s
foreign policy?
A
simpler explanation would be that the conflagration
in Iraq, its cost in lives and currency ever greater
and ever harder to justify to a querulous public,
has dictated the seeming ideological shift. As the
war drags on, rather than pointing Arab nations
to the beacon of Iraq, the US is likely to treat
Iraq as it has traditionally treated its other Arab
allies. To wit, the trappings of democracy are more
important than the content, responsibility for “reform”
is entrusted to those in power and support for democracy
is subordinate to US strategic goals.
If
that is “practical idealism,” then Rice’s speech
at AUC was a prime example. She began by insisting
that, contrary to popular belief in the region,
the US does not want to “impose” a particular form
of government when it speaks of spreading democracy.
Each country will choose its own form of democracy,
she said, but at a minimum democracy means the rights
to speak and associate freely and “freedom from
the midnight knock of the secret police.” The Egyptian
regime did not escape criticism. “We are all concerned,”
she said, “when peaceful supporters of democracy
face violence”—a reference to the beatings visited
upon protesters outside polling stations on the
day of the referendum on President Husni Mubarak’s
amendment to the constitution allowing for a multi-party
presidential election.
Two
months later, a pall of disappointment hangs over
Egypt, not because the regime has ignored Rice’s
words, but rather because it has heeded them well
enough to satisfy Washington. Opposition forces
can speak, write and associate with relative freedom—except
the outlawed Muslim Brothers, about whom Rice said
nothing. Mubarak took the rap on the knuckles for
the referendum-day thuggery, but surely smiled when
Rice said nothing about why the “supporters of democracy”
were protesting. The constitutional amendment placed
enough restrictions on who can run that the ruling
party’s man is assured of victory, even if, as the
secretary of state stipulated, voting occurs “without
violence or intimidation.” Though the protesters
do not accept the rules of the contest that the
regime has devised, Rice admonished them that they
“must peacefully accept the results.” Little wonder,
then, that Mubarak feels entirely safe running for
a fifth term as president.
With
the connivance of Egyptian intelligence, a similar
scenario unfolded in Palestine, another Arab country
hailed in Bush administration orations for its electoral
exercise. In late May, Bush introduced President
Mahmoud Abbas to the White House press corps as
a man whose campaign slogan could have been: “Vote
for me—I’m for peace, and I believe in democracy.”
But there were no remonstrations from Washington
when the Palestinian Authority postponed legislative
elections planned for July for fear that Hamas might
perform too well. Nor did the State Department object
when Abbas put off the general congress of his Fatah
party until after the parliamentary polls now rescheduled
for January 2006. Fatah reformers might have overthrown
the “old guard” in party councils, imperiling the
PA’s decision to cooperate with Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon’s ongoing “disengagement” from the
Gaza Strip, despite the comment of a Sharon adviser
that this unilateral maneuver is intended to apply
the “formaldehyde that is necessary so there will
not be a political process with the Palestinians.”
The Bush administration, having nodded vigorously
for three years whenever Sharon placed the onus
for peace on Palestinian “reform,” has never been
interested in how Palestinians define the concept.
It
was a State Department official, Paula Dobriansky,
who coined the term “Cedar Revolution” for the Arab
spring’s most dramatic and consequential events.
But the US had little to do with what the Lebanese
called the Independence Intifada—the campaign of
popular pressure that brought down a government
and compelled the hasty departure of an occupying
army. The protesters who camped out for weeks in
downtown Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square harbored fervent
hopes of extracting “the truth” about who killed
ex-Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri—hinting at grander
aspirations for a new politics of transparency and
accountability. Both the anti-Syrian demonstrations
and the Hizballah counter-demonstrations espoused
a symbolism of national unity. But here, as well,
the hopes of the spring wilted in the summer doldrums.
By
the time of Lebanon’s May-June parliamentary elections,
an old type of politics was back. The campaign was
driven by horse trading among the self-appointed
representatives of the country’s 18 confessional
communities, not by the comprehensive visions for
Lebanon’s future for which demonstrators and counter-demonstrators
alike were searching. The anti-Syrian opposition
fractured, allowing an unpopular electoral law drafted
under Syrian tutelage to stand and eventually allowing
Emile Lahoud to remain in the presidential office
where Syrian intervention had installed him. One
of the first acts of the new government was to pardon
former Phalangist warlord Samir Geagea, a reminder
of how much of “the truth” about the 1975-1990 civil
war remains buried under willful forgetfulness.
With the June assassinations of journalist Samir
Kassir and former Communist Party head Georges Hawi
also still unsolved, Lebanon is not free from fear.
Not that anyone consuming American news would know,
since Lebanon has lost its media-ready narrative
of good guys and bad guys, and, at least for the
time being, the US cannot use events there as a
club to beat Syria.
The
Baathist clique in Damascus, which had more to fear
from the Bush doctrine than any other regime, cannot
be distressed to watch Iraq revert to being a place
where opponents of the government sometimes hear
the midnight knock of the secret police. Elections
in Iraq have not ushered in a representative democracy,
but rather have emboldened the victors to press
maximalist demands in the constitution drafting
process. The Kurds have extended the borders of
their desired mega-province southward, and the Shi‘i
religious parties insist that Islam should be the
basis of Iraqi law. The coercion, US and Iraqi,
that has so far been required to contain the country’s
centrifugal forces is hardly nurturing a state culture
of respect for rule of law and civil rights. Rather
than trumpeting its envisioned model democracy,
the Bush administration could soon be cultivating
ties with an Iraqi quasi-autocracy willing to host
a US base or two.
“For
60 years,” Rice intoned in the AUC auditorium, “my
country, the United States, pursued stability at
the expense of democracy in this region here in
the Middle East—and we achieved neither.” This sentence,
since repeated like a mantra by more junior officials,
implies that the Bush administration believes democracy
is worth a little instability. In the real world,
the administration’s policies promote neither democracy
nor stability—and achieve neither as well.
