Interventions:
A Middle East Report Online Feature
"Free
People Will Set the Course of History"
Intellectuals,
Democracy and American Empire
Robert Blecher
(Robert
Blecher teaches history at the University of Richmond.)
March 2003
As the Bush
administration struggled to find a justification for launching
an attack on Iraq, churning out sketchy intelligence reports about
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and links with al-Qaeda, Washington
wordsmiths produced their own grist for the war mill: the prospect
of a democratic pax americana in the Middle East. The importance
of the pundits' contribution to the war machine should not be
underestimated. As the task of swaying public opinion grew more
difficult, rhetoric around freedom and democracy has become ever
more central. In the weeks after September 11, 2001, George W.
Bush did not talk of remaking the Middle East. But in successive
State of the Union addresses, commencement speeches, press conferences
and televised appeals to the nation, Bush showed increasing faith
in the ability of the US to extirpate tyranny and implant freedom
in this agonized region.
Presidents
did not always profess belief in the region's democratic potential,
nor did the intellectuals who served them. At the time of the
1991 Gulf war, shapers of public opinion such as Bernard Lewis
and Daniel Pipes toed the first Bush administration's line that
Washington should not aim to democratize the Middle East. But
by the leadup to the junior Bush's war on Iraq, the same thinkers
and pundits had reoriented their policy prescriptions, in many
cases directly contradicting their writings of a decade ago. Employing
their prodigious skills to trumpet the golden age of democracy,
they have set aside their former convictions to serve power.
The push
for American Empire has arisen from the convergence of diverse
ideological streams. Reaganite neo-conservatives such as William
Kristol and Robert Kagan leveraged the language of national security
to ally themselves with unreconstructed Cold Warriors like Donald
Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Yet given the lukewarm popular support
for the war in Iraq, the march to war could not have succeeded
without the assistance of Establishment academics and journalists
such as Fouad Ajami and Thomas Friedman, whose mainstream credentials
legitimized the administration's agenda among those who otherwise
might have been opposed. Rooted in the language of national security
and democracy, American Empire has been enabled by a convergence
-- not the congruence -- of political agendas. Neo-conservatives,
traditional conservatives and plain old-fashioned liberals have
formed a coalition of Iraq hawks whose spilling of ink has been
but a pale precursor to the spilling of Iraqi blood.
Those
Elusive Jeffersonians
The first
Gulf war was fought with little optimism and no sense of historical
mission. Democracy reigned triumphant, but not in the Arab
world. With the fall of the USSR and the Communist regimes of
Eastern Europe, the US won the Cold War not through invasion or
occupation, but through a long-term test of endurance. The eviction
of Iraq from Kuwait notwithstanding, US interests continued to
be served by Cold War strategy in the post-Gulf war Middle East.
Containment targeted Iran and Iraq. Belief in the importance of
regional policemen, rooted in the Nixon Doctrine, dictated alliance
formation. Stability was provided by Egypt, Israel, Turkey and
Saudi Arabia, their undemocratic features not only overlooked
but encouraged. These limited goals were reflected in Bush the
Elder's war aims: securing Saudi oil fields, reversing Iraqi aggression
in Kuwait and restoring Kuwait's ruling family.
The Middle
East, it seemed, had been left out of the democratic revolution.
As Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Bush
the Elder, told a press briefing in 1992:
Saddam
Hussein is a terrible person, he is a threat to his own people.
I think his people would be better off with a different leader,
but there is this sort of romantic notion that if Saddam Hussein
got hit by a bus tomorrow, some Jeffersonian democrat is waiting
in the wings to hold popular elections. (Laughter.) You're going
to get -- guess what -- probably another Saddam Hussein. It will
take a little while for them to paint the pictures all over the
walls again -- (laughter) -- but there should be no illusions
about the nature of that country or its society. And the American
people and all of the people who second-guess us now would have
been outraged if we had gone on to Baghdad and we found ourselves
in Baghdad with American soldiers patrolling the streets two years
later still looking for Jefferson. (Laughter.)
Disarming
his audience with jocular racism, Powell expressed his government's
pessimism about bringing democracy to the Middle East. Eleven
years later, on the eve of a new Gulf war, Powell would say that
a US victory "could fundamentally reshape the Middle East
in a powerful, positive way," [1] but in the early 1990s, the US administration
believed that democracy could be achieved only through mass popular
action. President Bush called on Iraqis to "take matters
into their own hands," encouraging them to do what peoples
across Eastern Europe had done to topple their own undemocratic
regimes. Prior to April 1991, even hawkish groups such as
the Committee for Security and Progress in the Gulf -- a forerunner
to the group of the same name formed in 1998 -- limited their
agendas to reversing the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Then the brutal
repression of Kurdish and Shi'i rebellions convinced the neo-conservative
wing of the Republican Party of the necessity of overthrowing
Saddam Hussein. In April 1991, a spate of editorials and op-eds
in the Wall Street Journal urged the US to intervene to
protect the Shi'a and Kurds. The importance of regime change was
articulated as a moral necessity, yet today's shapers of public
opinion had little to say about democracy per se.
Democracy
did not figure high on the list of US priorities for most of the
past decade. One could argue, in fact, that the Middle East became
a good deal less democratic over these years. Jordan and Egypt
reversed the limited democratic reforms they had instituted in
the 1980s. After Islamists won the 1992 vote in Algeria, the ruling
party canceled the elections, leading to a bloody civil war. In
Palestine Yasser Arafat, with the support and encouragement of
Israel and the United States, set up a nightwatchman quasi-state
that spent more than one third of its budget on the police and
security apparatus. The "Damascus spring" that followed
the death of Syrian President Hafiz al-Asad in June 2000 has morphed
into a bitter cold winter of despair. The hints in the early 1990s
that the Saudi monarchy would implement democratic reforms, including
a consultative council, evaporated; the regime, in the face of
mounting internal criticism, repressed dissent even more brutally.
Faced with similar pressures, until quite recently the ruling
family in Bahrain also refused to open its political system, kicking
off a period of civil unrest. Yemen endured a civil war, which
ended with the occupation of the south by the north under the
guise of unification. In the 1999 election, Yemeni president Ali
Abdallah Salih supposedly garnered more than 96 percent of the
vote -- a margin that is relatively low by the standards of the
region, where elections have become an index of repression, not
choice.
Perhaps the
most egregious example is Kuwait. After promising democratic reforms
in return for the US backing, the Al Sabah family failed to reinstate
the constitution, delayed elections for the National Assembly
and still does not permit women to vote. When questioned about
the ruling family's poor record, Bush retorted, "The war
wasn't fought about democracy in Kuwait." Privately, the
Kuwaitis were getting the same message. Nazir Al Sabah,
the Kuwaiti ambassador, reported: "I saw the president the
other day on Friday (June 7, [1991]) and he walked up to me in
the White House and said: 'Listen, Mr. Ambassador, we didn't fight
this war for democracy or those [war] trials. Don't be intimidated
by what's going on." [2] Deputy Assistant Secretary of
State David Mack found himself turning verbal somersaults to avoid
calling for democracy, instead calling upon Kuwait's rulers to
"maximize internal political participation in accordance
with all traditional institutions." [3]
James Schlesinger,
a former defense secretary, forthrightly summed up the US position
on democracy in the Middle East: "Do we seriously want to
change the institutions of Saudi Arabia? The brief answer is no;
over the years we have sought to preserve these institutions,
sometimes in preference to more democratic forces coursing throughout
the region. King Fahd [of Saudi Arabia] has stated quite unequivocally
that democratic institutions are not appropriate for this society.
What is interesting is that we do not seem to disagree."
[4]
Same Pipes,
Different Tune
Today's Iraq
hawks agreed fully with the administration's position. Soon after
the invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, they warned that democracy
was unlikely to come to the Middle East. Daniel Pipes, director
of the Middle East Forum and founder of Campus Watch, a website
dedicated to policing academics who study the Middle East, pushed
the line that Hussein's successor would be someone in the military.
Succession would be based on power, not principles, leading Pipes
to echo Bush's position that a "stable, defensible and non-bellicose"
Iraq was the best conceivable outcome.
[5] Democracy did not figure in the equation. If the Iraqi
regime was to be overthrown, it would be through a popular uprising,
not foreign intervention: "It is now up to the Iraqis themselves
to dispose of Saddam Hussein and his evil clique." Such a
result was likely, Pipes thought. On the first anniversary
of the Gulf war, Pipes incorrectly predicted, "Desert Storm
is likely to lead to Saddam's eventual overthrow." [6]
Like Colin
Powell, Pipes in late 1991 preferred to see Saddam Hussein remain
in power:
Iraqis,
their neighbors and the outside world have all been served reasonably
well by the delicate balance of power of the past nine months
which leaves Iraq neither too strong nor too weak. And we still
are. Yet this balance is a one-time thing; when undone, it is
permanently gone. Now, as then, getting rid of Saddam increases
the prospects of Iraqi civil war, Iranian and Syrian expansionism,
Kurdish irredentism and Turkish instability. Do we really want
to open these cans of worms?
The only
way to avoid these consequences of toppling Hussein, according
to Pipes, was "a very intrusive and protracted US military
presence in Iraq." He counseled against such a course:
And here
we revert to last year's dilemma: after American forces directly
unseat Saddam and occupy Iraq, what next? There were no good answers
to this question in 1990, and there are none today. If the administration
calculates costs, it will reach the same prudent conclusion it
reached early in 1991: don't stimulate regional havoc, don't take
direct responsibility for deciding the future of Iraq and don't
risk losing American lives -- probably many more than were lost
in Desert Storm -- on behalf of vague and undefined aims. We all
want Saddam gone; but unless Americans are prepared for an unlimited
occupation of Iraq, we'd do better letting the Iraqis get rid
of him. [7]
Given this
persuasive case against occupying Iraq, one could easily mistake
Pipes for an anti-war activist. It was not, however, a sense of
solidarity with the Iraqi people that motivated these sentiments,
as the following calumny reveals:
[The Middle
East] is also a region which marches to its own beat, and nearly
immune to such happy global developments as democratization,
increased respect for human rights and greater scope for the
market. Details shift but the basic picture remains surprisingly
stagnant.
Americans
should learn to keep their aspirations modest when it comes
to the Middle East. With the exception of the Middle East's
two democracies, Turkey and Israel, Washington should keep its
distance. To get too involved permits the misdeeds and failures
of others to become our own. Our will and our means are limited:
we probably cannot reconstruct Iraq as we did Japan or Germany.
Nor is our example likely to prevail; Egyptians and Saudis have
little use for our political system.
The Daniel
Pipes of 1992 is characterized by an unmitigated pessimism about
the prospects for Middle East democracy. Even Germany and Japan,
which later would become examples of successful US nation-building,
are inappropriate models for "stagnant" Arab societies
mired in the past. For all its strength, US power was seen as
limited, to be used sparingly, in a region that had been bypassed
by the New World Order:
This is
not a call for disengagement, much less isolationism. As in the
case of Iraqi aggression, the US government should use its influence
to address specific problems: the security of Israel, the stability
of moderate Arab regimes, the free-flow of oil, and the suppression
of terrorism. But it must know its limits and not believe that
the region is amenable to improvements along American lines.
[8]
A decade
after the 1991 Gulf war, Pipes has radically changed his tune.
Abandoning his previous concerns about the complications that
would arise from a US occupation of Iraq, he urged George W. Bush
to move on Baghdad: "the risks are overrated."
[9] In 2002, on MSNBC's "Buchanan and Press,'"he
directly contradicted his earlier comments about the potential
for Arab democracy: "It's in our interests that they modernize
and it's in our interests to help them modernize and I think we
know how. We are very modern and we can help them. Look, we've
done that elsewhere. Look, for example, at Japan. We defeated
the Japanese and then we guided them towards a democracy. We did
the same with Germany. We should be doing the same thing with
Iraq." Japan and Germany suddenly have become viable models
for the region to emulate. The US occupation of Iraq might not
be so bad, since the US now has the opportunity to "modernize"
the Middle East, or in terms of what Pipes rejected in 1992, the
region now seems to be "amenable to improvements along American
lines." The US-led New World Order has finally made it to
the Middle East: "The United States cannot pass up a unique
chance to remake the world's most politically fevered region."
[10] Pipes has become a supporter of American Empire.
Same Hama,
Different Rules
Pipes is
not the only figure to have reversed himself. Thomas Friedman,
journalist and self-appointed itinerant ambassador, established
his credentials as a Middle East expert with his first book, From
Beirut to Jerusalem. Therein he coined the term "Hama
rules" (referring to Hafiz al-Asad's bloody repression of
Islamist revolts in the Syrian city of Hama) to describe the guiding
principle of politics in the Middle East: rule or die. This truculent
logic informed his take on the Gulf war of 1990-91, which he saw
as a mechanism to restore the status quo: "This war was not
about healing. This war was never about competing visions for
the future of the Arab world. It was about a thief who had to
be stopped." [11] By 2003, he had decided the US was powerful
enough to break the hold of Hama rules and create real change
in the Middle East: "[O]ur kids will have a better chance
of growing up in a safer world if we help put Iraq on a more progressive
path and stimulate some real change in an Arab world that is badly
in need of reform." [12]
Or take Richard
Haass, director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff.
In 1997, he described the notion that the US would be the world's
only great power as "beyond our reach. It simply is not doable."
In terms of democracy, he stated forthrightly: "Primacy cannot
be confused with hegemony. The United States cannot compel others
to become more democratic." [13] By 2002, he had become a spokesman for what
the US could do instead of what it could not do to spread democracy:
"By failing to help foster gradual paths to democratization
in many of our important relationships -- by creating what might
be called a 'democratic exception' -- we missed an opportunity
to help these countries became more stable, more prosperous, more
peaceful and more adaptable to the stresses of a globalizing world.
It is not in our interest -- or that of the people living in the
Muslim world -- for the United States to continue this exception.
US policy will be more actively engaged in supporting democratic
trends in the Muslim world than ever before."
[14]
Intellectuals
who made their reputation within the academy have been no more
consistent. Take, for instance, Fouad Ajami. In 1990, Ajami railed
against the prospect of the US bringing democracy to the Middle
East: "The US is in the Gulf to defend order.... We're not
there to impose our rules. The injection of questions of democracy
into the debate is completely inappropriate." [15] Yet 13 years later, he advocates
precisely such an injection. In a recent article in Foreign
Affairs, Ajami rejects the restraint with which the US conducted
itself in 1991, arguing that the "dread of 'nation-building'
must be cast aside." Ajami throws in his lot with those who
"envisage a more profound American role in Arab political
life: the spearheading of a reformist project that seeks to modernize
and transform the Arab landscape. Iraq would be the starting point,
and beyond lies an Arab political and economic tradition and culture
whose agonies and failures have been on cruel display." As
with Pipes, the rehabilitation of Japan gives Ajami hope that
an "opening for democracy" is emerging in the Middle
East: "The theatrics and megalomania of Douglas MacArthur
may belong to a bygone age, but Iraq could do worse than having
the interim stewardship of a modern-day high commissioner who
would help usher it toward a normal world." While the advertising
consultants try to steer the US administration away from the language
of empire, intellectuals are not constrained by marketing strategies.
Ajami's rhetoric confirms that the Mandate -- the internationally
sanctioned occupation of the inter-war period that aimed to "raise
up subject peoples" -- is the imperial form of choice for
Iraq. [16]
"Bernard
Has Taught Us How"
Bernard Lewis
rejects Ajami's open invocation of empire, yet his writings mesh
with the American imperial agenda. Overall, Lewis has evinced
a remarkable continuity over his half-century career, yet on the
narrow issue of what the US can do to remake the Middle East,
he too seems to have shifted his position over the past decade.
In 1990, laying the roots for Samuel Huntington's later work,
Lewis wrote the world faced a "clash of civilizations"
that pitted "Judeo-Christian" against "Muslim"
culture. Islam was not monolithic, Lewis was quick to point out,
as "fundamentalism" was only one of many Islamic traditions:
"There are others, more tolerant, more open, that helped
to inspire the great achievements of Islamic civilization in the
past, and we may hope that these other traditions will in time
prevail." It is specifically violent Islam that has shaped
Lewis' recent cultural theorizing and authorizes his prescriptions
for US policy, yet he was more catholic in presenting the dilemmas
that confronted the region in the wake of the 1991 Gulf war: "[T]here
will be a hard struggle, in which we of the West can do little
or nothing. Even the attempt might do harm, for these are issues
that Muslims must decide among themselves."
[17]
Decide among
themselves. This rhetoric of choice has been a consistent feature
of Lewis's thought for more than 50 years, dating to his first
monograph, The Arabs in History. In 1950, Lewis wrote that
Arabs, faced with "problems of readjustment," had three
choices: taking on some version of "modern civilization,"
rejecting "the West and all its works, pursuing the mirage
of a return to the lost theocratic ideal" or "renewing
their society from within, meeting the West on terms of equal
cooperation." Over the next four decades, the Arabs did not
live up the hope Lewis had placed in them, but the Gulf war seemed
to widen the space for the Arabs to make the right choice. In
the rebellion of the Kurds and the Shi'a, he saw the possibility
of a new age:
It may
turn out that the civil war that destroyed Lebanon was a pilot
project for the whole region, and that with very few exceptions
states will disintegrate into a chaos of squabbling, fighting
sects, tribes and regions.... Or it may be that the peoples of
the region will free themselves at last from the politics of bribery,
cajolery, blackmail and force, and find their way to the freer
and better life to which they have so long aspired. The important
change is that the choice is now their own. [18]
Even as Saddam
Hussein slaughtered the Kurds and Shi'a, Lewis retained his conviction
that only the peoples of the region could remake their future:
"For the first time in more than two centuries, this choice
is entirely their own.... Those who care about the Middle East
and its peoples can only hope that they will choose well and soon."
[19]
Today, Lewis
is still waiting for the Arabs to figure it out. His recent bestseller,
What Went Wrong?, like his The Middle East: A Brief
History of the Past 2,000 Years, presents a familiar choice:
If the
peoples of the Middle East continue on their present path, the
suicide bomber may become a metaphor for the whole region, and
there will be no escape from a downward spiral of hate and spite,
rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression, culminating sooner
or later in yet another alien domination.... If they can abandon
grievance and victimhood, settle their differences, and join their
talents, energies, and resources in a common creative endeavor,
than they can once again make the Middle East, in modern times
as it was in antiquity and the Middle Ages, a major center of
civilization. For the time being, the choice is their own. [20]
The rhetoric
of choice implies agnosticism about what the future holds. As
Lewis wondered during the 1991 Gulf war, "Will there be more
of the same, or can one really hope for democratization in the
Arab world?" [21] This agnosticism, however,
is disingenuous because it is embedded in a historical narrative
that removes the uncertainty that lies at the root of any real
question. The narrative of his book -- in fact, his entire oeuvre
-- updates "decline theory," that is, the notion that
the Ottoman Empire was once a great civilization but began a steady
and uninterrupted decline in the sixteenth century. Lewis extends
this methodology from Ottoman history into the popular realm,
showing how Arab "problems of readjustment" (1950) or
their "spiral of hate and rage" (2003) stem from their
inability to cope with the modern world. This overarching trajectory
removes the uncertainty that Lewis affects; it is not a question
of his earnestness, but rather the pessimism that suffuses his
writing. He would have us believe that history is bi-directional,
but the inertia of his narrative runs in one direction only. Without
someone or something to arrest the decline, his structure -- if
not his words -- tell us that the Middle East is destined only
for more of the same.
Enter imperial
America and it neo-conservative architects. US hegemony, for Lewis,
offers the hope of rescuing a fallen people from their state of
degradation. Not only will the US promote values of freedom and
democracy; it promises salvation as the one power that can stand
against the inexorable historical trajectory that pulling the
Middle East downward. George W. Bush recently articulated this
historical mission: "We meet here during a crucial period
in the history of our nation and of the civilized world. Part
of that history was written by others; the rest will be written
by us." [22] Theorists of decline such as Lewis could
not agree more. As they would have it, ever since Ottoman vitality
petered out four centuries ago, the West has provided the ideas,
inspiration and means to move the Middle East into the modern
world. Left to their own devices, Arabs are destined to remain
in the misery they have chosen for themselves. This explains why
Lewis wrote in 1996 -- when internal opposition constituted the
only possible path to toppling Hussein -- that "in Iraq and
Syria, an overthrow of the present dictators is unlikely to lead
to the immediate establishment of a workable democracy."
[23]
The neo-conservatives,
for their part, appreciate Lewis since he provides more than just
an air of academic respectability for the administration's program.
He offers a raison d'etre for US hegemony in the Middle
East. Paul Wolfowitz, the administration's main proponent for
toppling Saddam Hussein, told a conference in Tel Aviv, "Bernard
has taught [us] how to understand the complex and important history
of the Middle East and use it to guide us where we will go next
to build a better world for generations." [24] In 1998, Lewis signed an open
letter to President Bill Clinton that called for the toppling
of Saddam Hussein with a massive bombing campaign and, if need
be, ground troops. Co-signers included not only the neo-conservative
pundits William Kristol and Robert Kagan, and the über-hawk
Richard Perle, but also Bush appointees who have shaped the administration's
policy: Elliott Abrams, Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Douglas
Feith, Zalmay Khalilzad, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.
These blossoming
links explain why Lewis was invited to participate in a meeting
of the Defense Advisory Board on September 19, 2001 and subsequent
meetings with Bush and Cheney. Lewis won't say what was discussed
at these meetings, but they are said to have been influential
in promoting Wolfowitz's agenda to attack Iraq.
[25] One report characterized Lewis as endorsing the line
that the US "was guilty of 'betrayals'" of the Iraqi
people when it failed to support their uprisings in both 1991
and 1995. He promoted the Iraqi oppositional groups as viable,
as the best hope for stable democracy in the Middle East.
[26] He told Bush and Cheney, like other officials, that
the time had come to act for the peoples of Iraq. [27] By late 2002, as the US war machine was gearing
up, he told a conference at AEI that he is "cautiously optimistic"
about the prospect for developing a democratic regime in Iraq. [28] Elsewhere, he declared himself "very
optimistic" about a post-war Iraq:
I think
Iraq in many way is the most advanced, most developed of the Arab
countries.... Although all this has suffered terrible damage at
the hands of Saddam Hussein, it has not been entirely destroyed.
I see the possibility of a genuinely enlightened and progressive
and -- yes, I will say the word -- democratic regime arising in
a post-Saddam Iraq. [29]
Lewis has
remained consistent in his assessment that even the most optimistic
of scenarios will come to pass slowly. In 1996, he wrote: "Democracy
cannot be born like Aphrodite from the sea foam. It comes in slow
stages." [30]
More recently, he said that the US cannot simply install
an American-style democracy; it is "unrealistic" to
think that a political system can be engineered overnight, especially
if it appears to be the result of "forced change by an external
force." [31] Today, however, the US can create the conditions
under which Iraqi and Middle Eastern peoples might make, at long
last, the correct choice. US tutelage will arrest their centuries-long
period of decline and restore the grandeur of antiquity. For the
Lewis of 2003, unlike the Lewis of 1990, the West has an active
role to play in this process. The agnostic has become a believer.
Making
the Right Choice
Like the
stewards of American policy, Lewis thinks that political culture
can be remade by simply opening the playing field and allowing
Iraqis to make the right choice. While some in the State Department
do not find the democracy domino theory credible, [32] the neo-conservatives have been assuming
that once Iraq gets on the right track, other countries will hop
on the democratic bandwagon. Choice, however, has not always been
a viable mechanism for change, since at certain moments when peoples
of the Middle East have made choices -- in Iran in 1953, for example
-- the US forcibly reversed them. The rhetoric of choice obscures
the fact that US policy will necessarily involve the use of military
might. Administration officials have spoken only vaguely about
their plans for specific countries, but when they do, one gets
the feeling that the spread of democracy might not be smooth as
their optimistic rhetoric implies. When Undersecretary of State
John Bolton found himself in front of a friendly crowd in Israel,
for instance, he proclaimed with uncharacteristic forthrightness
"that he has no doubt America will attack Iraq,
and that it will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria,
Iran and North Korea afterwards." [33] Democracy, it seems, will grow out of
the barrel of a gun.
Yet even
once the democratic "choice" is made, US interests will
not be assured, since new democratic polities could disregard
US cues. French and German democracy has not been a great boon
to the current administration. Iraq's non-democratic neighbors
are providing the greatest assistance to the US, whereas relatively
democratic Turkey has caused consternation among Washington planners.
Even beyond the war, continued US support for Israel, demands
for basing rights and efforts to extract greater oil profits could
inflame public opinion, which in turn would produce restraints
on governmental cooperation. At the very least, a government accountable
to its people would demand concessions from the US in exchange
for cooperation, which is perhaps why Douglas Feith recommended
to an AEI conference in 1998 that the US push a notion of democracy
built around limited government and personal freedoms, not majority
rule. [34] Bernard Lewis is similarly
apprehensive about democracy running amok. While he rails against
the "deep-seated, insidious prejudice...[that] Arabs are
incapable of democratic institutions," he nevertheless cautions
that "we should be realistic in our expectations. Democracy
is strong medicine, which has to be administered in small gradually
increasing doses otherwise you risk killing the patient";
Hitler, after all, came to power "in a free and fair election."
[35] Lewis worries that that democracy will give Arabs the
chance to choose wrongly, disappointing him once again, as they
have done repeatedly over his career. For Feith and Lewis, democracy
needs to be scaled back, lest the US actually get the robust democracy
that the Bush administration claims to want.
Conservative
intellectuals in the US, for their part, have not hesitated to
make the right choice, allying themselves with US Empire. They
have recently attacked the field of Middle East Studies for failing
to pay homage to the "essentially beneficent role in the
world" that the US plays. [36] In dubbing the entire field
a "failure," servants of empire such as Martin Kramer
have implied that scholarship on the Middle East is of value only
inasmuch as it supports US policy. By this standard, the Iraq
hawks have succeeded mightily. Accommodating themselves to the
political fashion of the day, they have prioritized political
expediency over intellectual rigor and consistency. Middle East
academics have been accused of "groupthink" and illegitimately
politicizing their scholarship, but ironically, it is the Iraq
hawks whose work is politicized in the most literal sense, reflecting
policy groupthink and the Washington consensus. Are Japan and
Germany suitable models for reconstructing Iraq? Is the "injection
of the question of democracy" in the Middle East appropriate?
Is the region "amenable to improvements along American lines"?
Can the US military create the conditions for democracy? The Iraq
hawks now answer these questions in the affirmative even though
very little has changed in the region to give hope to the partisans
of democracy.
Much has
changed elsewhere, of course. The murder of over 3,000 civilians
on September 11 gave renewed impetus to American hegemony and
stripped away the public's hesitation to project force around
the globe. It is this change that accounts for the consensus that
includes establishment commentators and neo-conservative rabble-rousers.
As they would have it, the potential for democratization has arisen
from the fortuitous coincidence of Saddam Hussein's obstinacy
and American beneficence. Leaving aside the question of US intentions,
this formulation omits a third aspect of the current historical
conjuncture: the newfound American willingness to occupy nations
and remake them in its image. The US has used force on previous
occasions to overthrow governments. What distinguishes the current
moment -- and the Iraq hawks' about-face since the 1991 Gulf war
-- is the apparent zeal to inculcate a new set of political and
cultural sensitivities among an entire people. This imperial enthusiasm
is specious, however, in that talk of democracy is little more
than a mechanism for creating compliant states that will "choose"
to further US interests. As the US military has wielded its weapons
in the service of American Empire, so too have its intellectual
boosters.
Footnotes
[1] Quoted in Daniel Pipes, "America: Be Ambitious
After Iraq," Jerusalem Post, February 12, 2003.
[3] Louise Lief, "Kuwait's Fight for Democracy,"
US News &World Report, May 13, 1991.
[4] Quoted in Alain Gresh, "The Legacy of Desert
Storm: A European Perspective," Journal of Palestine Studies
26/4 (Summer 1997). Gresh offers a similar laundry list of setbacks
for democracy in the Middle East.
[5] Pipes, "Why Arabs Aren't Rioting," Wall
Street Journal (Europe), January 23, 1991.
[6] Pipes, "One Year Later: Was Operation Desert
Storm Worth It?" Philadelphia Inquirer, January 16,
1992.
[7] Pipes, "Let the Iraqis Get Rid of Saddam,"
Washington Post, December 22, 1991.
[8] Pipes, "After Desert Storm, No Real Change
in the Middle East," Jewish Exponent, January 17,
1992.
[9] Pipes and Jonathan Schanzer, "On to Baghdad?
Yes -- The Risks Are Overrated," New York Post, December
3, 2001.
[15] Robert S. Greenberger, "Calls for Democracy
in the Middle East Are Creating a Dilemma for White House,"
Wall Street Journal, October 8, 1990.
[16] Keith Watenpaugh, "The Guiding Principles
and the US 'Mandate' for Iraq: Twentieth-Century Colonialism and
America's New Empire,"Logos 2/1 (Winter 2003).
[17] Bernard Lewis, "The Roots of Muslim Rage,"
Atlantic Monthly, September 1990.
[18] Lewis, "Mideast States: Pawns No Longer
in Imperial Games," Wall Street Journal, April 11,
1991.
[26] Carla Anne Robbins and Jeanne Cummings, "How
Bush Decided That Hussein Must be Ousted from Atop Iraq,"
Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2002; Robert L. Bartley,
"Thinking Things Over: Liberate Iraq, Unleash Democracy,"
Wall Street Journal (Europe), December 18, 2001.
[27] Anthony Lewis, "Bush and Iraq," New
York Review of Books, November 7, 2002.
[36] Martin Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand: The
Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (Washington:
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001), p. 129.
