"Should the United States Try to Promote Democracy in the Middle East?"
Address by Carl Gershman, President of the NED

B'nai Israel Congregation
Saturday, August 11, 2007

Shabbat Shalom. Golda Meir used to quip that the Israelis had a complaint against Moses for taking them 40 years through the desert only to bring them to the one spot in the Middle East that had no oil. She might have added that he also brought them to a neighborhood where they were not welcome a neighborhood that even in the time of Moses, as we have been reading for the past three weeks in Devarim, was inhabited by hostile tribes whose forbidding presence forced him to follow a circuitous route to the Land of Canaan. As we know, the Middle East remains a very troublesome region, and not just for Israel. From the time of the Barbary pirates until today, the security of our own country has been deeply affected by our relations with the countries of the Middle East, never more so than since the events of 9/11, the sixth anniversary of which we will observe a month from today.

The terrorist acts of 9/11 brought about a sea change in U.S. policy toward the Middle East. Before then, our policy was driven almost exclusively by security and economic concerns. We paid scant attention to issues of human rights and democracy in the region, believing that democracy was not suitable for the Arab world and that trying to encourage it would only foster instability and undermine U.S. interests.

President Bush repudiated that doctrine in 2003 in a seminal address delivered on the occasion of the National Endowment for Democracys 20th anniversary. "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East," he said, "did nothing to make us safe because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export." Adding that "it would be reckless to accept the status quo," the President called for "a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East."

But this new policy was hardly announced before it ran up against extraordinary obstacles among them the election of Hamas, the war in Lebanon, the backsliding in Egypt, the rise of Iran, and the continuing violence in Iraq. As these and other crises unfolded, the Administration quickly refocused its attention on immediate security concerns, and the so-called realists in the foreign policy community mounted a counter-attack against the democracy policy, which Martin Kramer called "a fool's errand."

Thus the question posed in the title of my talk: Should the United States try to promote democracy in the Middle East? And if it should, how can it do so effectively? I think the answer to the first question is yes, for all the reasons given by President Bush. We actually have little choice. In a region like the Middle East, where deep-rooted historical and cultural resentment against the West is being exploited by a pseudo-religious movement of ideological hatred, dictatorship and political dysfunction inevitably provide a breeding ground for terrorism. While we have to defend ourselves against such movements by various means, including the use of military force, the only long-term solution is to change the conditions that produce terrorism, which means encouraging the development in the Arab Middle East of successful democratic societies grounded in the rule of law and integrated into the global economy.

This task may be exceedingly difficult, but it is far from hopeless. Despite the recent setbacks, there have been some quiet but noticeable changes taking place in the region and signs of a new democratic ferment. For example, polling data compiled by the World Values Surveys show that support in the region for democracy, meaning political rights and participation, is more widespread than ever before, even if liberal values, such as equal rights for women, are still weak.

In addition, the Internet and the communications revolution have now reached the Middle East, ending state control of information. To be sure, the state is fighting back by prosecuting journalists and bloggers under laws that prohibit speech that the authorities consider offensive to the head of state, un-Islamic, or harmful to the country's reputation. But the state no longer monopolizes the media as it did in the past. Consider, for example, that there are now 600 YouTube videos on torture in Egypt.

Not least, there have been some modest but positive changes in countries outside the conflict zones of Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories -- in Jordan, Morocco, Yemen, Mauritania, and the Gulf states, even in Saudi Arabia where some tentative first steps have been taken in the form of municipal elections in 2005 and other reforms.

Such changes, of course, fall far short of democratization, and the conditions for democratic breakthroughs in the near term are not promising. Liberal forces in the Middle East are weak, and politics is dominated by autocratic governments and Islamist opposition movements. The Egyptian and some other governments argue that keeping politics under their tight control is necessary to prevent the Islamists from taking over. But the autocratic approach may actually work to the advantage of the Islamists since they can speak and organize with relative freedom within the mosque, whereas the civil society activists, journalists, opposition politicians and professionals who make up the small democratic center must operate under severe restrictions. The liberal activists would be a stronger counter-weight to the Islamists if they were allowed to participate in a more open process. As it is, the Islamists can present themselves as the only alternative to an establishment that is generally viewed as corrupt and unresponsive, while that establishment, in turn, justifies itself as the last line of defense against the Islamists.

U.S. efforts to promote democracy in the Middle East will not make any meaningful progress without addressing this symbiotic relationship between the autocrats and the Islamists. While there is no simple answer to this problem, it's instructive to look at the experience of some countries in the Middle East where cautious steps have been taken to open the political process to the participation of Islamist parties.

In Jordan, for example, the participation with occasional interruptions of the Islamic Action Front, the party of the Muslim Brotherhood, in elections to the lower house is seen by some analysts as a key reason Jordan has remained stable despite the deteriorating conditions in nearby Iraq and Palestine. In Yemen, the Islamist Islah party participated last September on the losing side of the freest presidential election ever held in an Arab country, an inclusive process seen by President Saleh as the best way to keep his fractious country together and to get badly needed foreign aid. In Morocco and Kuwait, Islamists are now represented in the parliament and will be part of a developing debate over whether and how these traditional autocratic monarchies might evolve into constitutional monarchies on the European model. Turkey is not an Arab country, but the ruling AK party, which evolved out of the Islamist movement and won last month's elections on a program of liberal economic reform and integration into Europe, offers a democratic model for the Arab and the larger Muslim world.

A very different situation obtains in Egypt, where the strong showing in parliamentary elections of candidates associated with the Muslim Brotherhood has been followed by a harsh crackdown on all opposition groups. The Muslim Brotherhood has publicly affirmed its commitment to nonviolence and the democratic process, though there is little agreement in Egypt or among analysts in this country as to its sincerity. Speak to Egyptian government officials and they will tell you about the practice of Taqiyaa, or deception, whereby Islamists have traditionally hidden their real convictions in the pursuit of power. Is that true in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood? We don't know.

What we can say with some assurance is that the movement itself is divided, as all such movements are as they grapple with the dilemmas of modernization and the trade-offs between progress and loss of identity. Opening the political process to their participation contains risks and must therefore be done in a gradual and cautious way, as it has in all of the countries I have mentioned. But not opening it also contains risks, as President Bush said when he enunciated his new policy nearly four years ago. No course is risk-free, but there is a growing body of evidence to support the view that in situations of relative social peace, and on the condition that the Islamists explicitly reject violence, bringing them into the political process can encourage pragmatism and moderation, in the mainstream if not at the fringe. It is one thing to proclaim from the confines of the mosque, and against an autocratic and often corrupt establishment, that Islam is the solution. It is quite another thing to turn that slogan into a political program that can address the real economic and social problems that people face, and to have to make that case in competition with secular parties that have the freedom to organize and project their message.

President Mubarak is known to point to the Hamas victory in the Palestinian elections to justify the course he has chosen. But I dont think the Palestinian situation yields the kind of vindication that Mubarak seeks. For one thing, Hamas had not renounced the use of violence and therefore should not have been allowed to participate in last year's Palestinian elections, which were thus an example of what should not be done, not of what happens when you proceed correctly with a democratic opening. But even more to the point, Hamas won not because most Palestinians supported its Islamic agenda but because the ruling Fatah group was so despised for its corruption. It was a classic case of Islamists winning because they were the only alternative to corrupt and abusive autocrats. The resulting disaster should not be taken as a vindication of Mubarak's course, but rather as a warning that an unreformed Fatah cannot be a reliable ally in the search for peace and stability. Natan Sharansky often makes the same point by quoting with irony Yitzhak Rabin's famous statement that Arafat made a good peace partner because he could deal with terrorists "without a Supreme Court, without B'tselem, and without all kinds of bleeding heart liberals." Events belied this illusion.

Democracy will come to the Middle East, if it comes at all, only gradually m'ot m'aut, little by little, as was said in last week's parshah in reference to the Jewish settlement of the Promised Land. It will inevitably be a long-term process, and we will need to stay committed over time if we want to see results. It that regard, we would do well to bear in mind the mythical story of the man from Chelm, the famous village of East European Jews. As the story goes, he had been appointed to stand at the village gate and watch for the coming of the Messiah, but after a time complained that the pay was too low. "You're right," the village elders said in response. "The pay is low. But consider: the work is steady." And so it is in the Middle East steady work. But let us hope that democracy will come before the Messiah. Shabbat Shalom.