Muslims and Liberals

Hartford Courant
March 17, 2003

President George W. Bush announced the other day he would help democratize postwar Iraq, which would spur a drive for “freedom in other nations in the region.” Democracies “desire peace,” and he expected democratic Arab regimes to facilitate peacemaking between Israel and the Palestinians.

Two days later, the parliament in Turkey — a secular Muslim democracy and close ally — voted to bar U.S. troops from using its territory for a possible war with Iraq, saying in effect it desires peace between Washington and Baghdad.

Does the president still want to democratize the rest of the Muslim Middle East?

Since 1996, a group of American neoconservatives and Likudniks have been peddling the Arab democratization plan on the assumption that a democratic neighborhood would be more peaceable for Israel. The strategy also calls for the demilitarization of Iraq to preserve Israel’s monopoly in unconventional weapons, and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Israel’s implacable enemy. Three of the plan’s architects hold key posts on Pentagon and vice presidential staffs.

Americans in a postwar Baghdad would be too busy watching their backs to devote time to building democracy. During two extensive trips through Iraq in the 1990s, I met Iraqis who hated Saddam Hussein. The only people they hated more were Americans. Their eyes blazed with rage against the United States as they told me about the deaths, diseases and hardships inflicted by Operation Desert Storm and economic sanctions.

Unlike Germany and Japan, Iraq didn’t start a world war or hurt any Americans. The Iraqis wouldn’t have the sense of guilt the Germans and Japanese had after World War II. Hence they wouldn’t be very hospitable to a Gen. Douglas MacArthur puffing a pipe and telling them how to run their business.

A regime change in Iraq would, however, help the cause of freedom in the region in the long run. Abdul Karim Al-Eryani, now prime minister of Yemen, told me in Saana in October 1991 that after Saddam, “Iraq has only one way to go — the democratic way. And once Iraqis start on the democratic route, the [Gulf monarchies] would find it hard to resist the tide.”

Seventy percent of the Arabs are below age 30, and the Arab literacy rate is above 70 percent. Growing up in a globalizing world that is being swept by winds of freedom, these younger Arabs are unlikely to put up with their autocratic governments for too long. The best thing the United States can do to help them is to stop coddling those repressive governments it calls “moderate.”

The democratization of Iraq or the Arab world wouldn’t happen overnight, however. American democracy took 189 years, a catastrophic civil war and a traumatic civil rights movement to accept African Americans as full citizens and 144 years to give women the right to vote. Let’s hope the voyage of Arabs toward full- fledged democracy is shorter and smoother.

And if the Turkish parliamentary vote on U.S. troop deployment is any indication, the United States should have no illusions about the loyalty of democratic Muslim regimes. Muslim voters would almost unanimously oppose the current Israeli terms for Middle East peace, which would leave the Palestinians languishing in a bantustan under the Israeli thumb. The best recipe to ensure the security of Israel and bring peace to the region would be to let the Palestinians have a viable sovereign state. Manipulating the region’s political map wouldn’t change that reality.