Which side of history?
Mar 10th, 2009 by MESH
From Michele Dunne
I am one of more than 140 scholars and experts to sign a letter to President Obama, released today (March 10), asking him to take seriously his inaugural statement that leaders who “cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent” are “on the wrong side of history.” The question is, on which side of history will the Obama administration place itself in its policy toward the Middle East?
Early indications are for a return to traditional diplomacy and jettisoning of any serious efforts to promote democracy, freedom, and human rights. While the signatories of this letter might differ on some issues, we are joined by the belief that this early course by Obama and Secretary of State Clinton needs immediate correction. We understand that promoting Middle East peace enjoys a high priority in this administration, and we believe that it is entirely possible to cooperate with Arab governments in that endeavor while also pursuing improved human, civil, and political rights for Arab citizens. In fact, not to do so would be shortsighted and ultimately counter productive.
Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.
9 Responses to “Which side of history?”
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I welcome Michele Dunne’s efforts and certainly agree that it would be a travesty if the Obama administration abandoned transformative diplomacy and advocacy for human rights altogether. What was frustrating over the last eight years was how the debate over democratization became so partisan and, indeed, what we see now is a wholesale shift in which, for so many Democrats (the signers of this letter obviously excepted), the concept remains too tainted to implement. Simultaneously, there seems to be a flawed assumption by policymakers that reliance on autocracies is somehow beneficial to U.S. security or that ignoring human rights can somehow reverse knee-jerk anti-Americanism.
I fear, however, that the letter signed by 140 policy practitioners, bloggers, and activists, is flawed in its advocacy for the inclusion of Islamists:
First of all, some of the examples are less than meets the eye. Turkey is becoming, day-by-day, less a model of Islamist moderation and more an embarrassment. Indeed, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s commitment to democracy is certainly worthy of broader debate. Soner Cağaptay’s writings on the subject are always provocative and unfortunately correct. The moderation of Indonesian Islamists, too, appears shaky.
In his Meridan House address (June 2, 1992), Edward Djerejian spoke of the problem, in the context of the cancelled Algerian elections, of one-man, one-vote, one-time. The problem has not gone away. Islamists are quite good at utilizing the rhetoric of democracy, but seem to fall short in practice. This came to the head at a January 2006 AEI conference in which a representative from the one of the organizations behind the letter questioned Ms. Rola Dashti, a leader of the women’s suffrage movement in Kuwait:
The question of sincerity is one we should not be afraid to tackle. After all, we have gotten burned before. In 1979, Richard Falk, a political science professor at Princeton well-regarded by the Carter administration, urged the U.S. government not to fear Khomeini. “The depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false,” Falk wrote in the New York Times (February 16, 1979), adding “His close advisors are uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals.” Senate Staffer William Miller made similar statements. The United States got burned, and so too did the people who had to live under increasingly repressive Islamism.
So how to address the problem of democratization and Islamism? One of the failures of the Bush administration was its inability to say that legitimate democratization requires the renunciation of political party militias. Legitimacy should come through the ballot box, not force of arms.
While Bush may have failed, he did latch onto a good conception promoted by letter-signatory Saad Eddin Ibrahim, before Saad shifted his arguments to favor greater engagement of Islamists. The old Saad was right; I’m afraid the new Saad is wrong. The old Saad argued that liberals had for too long been between a rock and a hard place. They were victims not only of authoritarian regimes who had at their disposal all the mechanisms of state, but also of Islamist parties, who maintained an elaborate support structure through the mosque. Embracing Islamists won’t break that dynamic. Indeed, before sustainable democracy can take root in the region—and it certainly can take root—the problem of how to strengthen liberalism needs to be addressed. Weakening authoritarians so that Islamists can fill the vacuum is simply trading apples for apples.
Michael Rubin is a member of MESH.
Michael Rubin’s comment misrepresents the CSID/POMED letter’s attitude toward Islamist movements—and, more importantly, misconceives the challenges for America of building democracy in the Arab world. Let me try to make corrections on both counts.
First, the signers of the CSID/POMED letter, myself included, are not arguing that America should embrace Islamist parties—we are pointing out that it would be counterproductive to exclude them a priori from our efforts to help the region build a democratic future. The point is that we have to get beyond our Algerian nightmares to look at each individual group’s ideas and actions in the cold light of day, and judge them accordingly.
Rola Dashti’s colloquy with Aly Abuzakook is a great example of what this looks like in practice. Rola is a dear friend, a true liberal, and she’s absolutely right about the ideological attitude and the dirty tricks adopted by the Kuwaiti Brotherhood in its (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to prevent women from gaining the franchise in Kuwait. That there is ample evidence on the Kuwait Brotherhood to judge their illiberal ideas and methods is, in part, because Kuwait has an open enough press and an open enough political process that the local Islamists are compelled to take public stances on the issues and defend them against liberal critiques from people like Rola. Their conversation occurred at AEI, but I can also imagine it taking place in the pages of Kuwaiti papers.
So far, despite their illiberal views, the Kuwaiti Brotherhood has played by the rules. This does not necessarily mean they are moderating—but it, and Kuwait’s relative openness, means that folks like Rola have a fighting chance in Kuwait that they don’t have elsewhere in the region. So what we know about the Kuwaiti Brotherhood suggests that the United States government should under no circumstances embrace them—but it might also mean we don’t have to worry about them taking over.
In Egypt, by contrast, the Brotherhood feels no such pressure to debate their ideas publicly, and so we can’t really know how to evaluate their real intentions. Because Egypt’s government so severely restricts political organization and debate, that the local Brotherhood is relatively unchallenged in the public sphere, and is in the enviable position of serving as an empty vessel for the hopes and resentments of Egyptians. Americans (and many Egyptians) naturally worry about whether the Brotherhood would subvert democracy if they gain power. Of course, the Mubaraks prefer it that way, so they can use the Brotherhood as a bogeyman against Washington.
This “empty vessel” problem is the consequence of decades in which autocratic regimes prevented social and political organization in every possible forum—except the one institution they couldn’t fully control, the mosque. Saad Eddin Ibrahim was and is correct to point out that the region’s liberals are between a rock and a hard place—and I will add that this situation is sustained by American continued acquiescence in authoritarian control, a stance supported by those who, like Michael Rubin, fear another Algeria or Iran.
As I discuss at length in my book, Freedom’s Unsteady March, this “Algerian nightmare” is a powerful specter that prevented both Democratic and Republican American policymakers from seriously working to advance political openings in the Middle East—but even worse, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The current situation of authoritarian control and Islamist subversion squeezes political alternatives out of the public square. The longer we abjure from promoting freedom out of fear of Islamist triumph, the further we entrench the Islamists’ political advantage in the now-tilted playing field. The more entrenched the Islamists become as the political alternative to the status quo, the more the language of Islamism becomes the language of protest politics and other voices become marginalized. Already, research by Mark Tessler suggests that the most powerful determinant of public support for Islamist parties is simple dissatisfaction with the status quo.
That’s why what Michael calls “old Saad” and “new Saad” are actually completely consistent—the same liberal commitments to open political debate and mutual toleration, with a clear-eyed recognition of the changed political context since 1992, in which Islamists have made a devil’s bargain with autocrats to shut liberals out.
If one follows Michael’s prescription and waits to promote democratic openings until liberals are stronger, one may well wait forever. In practice, it is nearly impossible to strengthen the appeal of liberals or liberalism in the context of authoritarian control. You can keep liberals and their ideas alive, barely—but liberals can only challenge orthodoxies and make their case to the public when they have public space in which to do so. That means the United States must promote political freedom if it wants to strengthen liberalism. “Keeping the lid on” out of fear of another Algeria is the best way to get another Algeria—or even another Iran.
The Bush administration’s failure to overcome the legacy of Algeria and develop a more sophisticated understanding of and approach to Islamist movements produced an ineffective and ambivalent policy, and helped produce the intense backlash we now face against democracy promotion in the Middle East. Michael Rubin’s stance does not advance the ball beyond the Bush experience—it actually pulls us further backward. But, as I wrote in Freedom’s Unsteady March,
In my book I lay out criteria America can use to assess the likely democratic compatibility of Islamist—or any other—political movements in the authoritarian context of the Arab world. It’s long past time to move beyond the lessons of 1979 and 1992, and start building policy on more contemporary analysis of the political landscape confronting the United States in the Middle East.
Scholars and policymakers who have started down this road are well-represented among the signatories of the CSID/POMED letter, and those who dip into their scholarship will likely come to agree with Michele and myself that political freedom and open political competition are the best means to build long-term stability and advance enduring American interests in the Middle East.
Tamara Cofman Wittes is a member of MESH.
Tamara Cofman Wittes certainly provides a representative argument to take Islamists at their word and allow them to participate, and a valuable one to illustrate the debate. It is necessary to correct one unfair and inaccurate assertion. Her statement that I support “American continued acquiescence in authoritarian control” is inaccurate and in sharp contrast to everything I have written and advocated, and so with this note I correct the record. My only difference with Wittes is a disagreement with her belief that Islamist parties are sincere and engagement with them benefits liberalism in the Middle East. While she suggests that Freedom’s Unsteady March is the sum of scholarship on the issue, she may find that many Arab liberals may not agree with its conclusions. Many of their essays can be found in the book Dissent and Reform in the Arab World.
Michael Rubin is a member of MESH.
During one of my last visits to Cairo I met with a British diplomat friend of mine who was then dating a Cairene. She and a friend from the American University of Cairo joined us for drinks one night at one of the swankier hotels along the Nile. Over meze and a glass of wine the conversation turned to politics and I asked the young women who they would vote for if they could vote today. Their answer surprised me. “The Muslim Brotherhood, of course! They’re the only ones who can rid us of this kleptocracy we call a government.”
That these Western-oriented, young women, dressed in jeans, sans hijab, smoking and drinking with foreigners would consider voting for the Muslim Brotherhood is shocking but reveals the truth of the moment: would-be liberals in today’s Arab world have no other opposition to support than Islamist ones. That this is the current reality, however, should not mean sublimating or sacrificing altogether liberal democratic objectives to Islamist goals.
I support Michele and Tamara’s broad point that political reform processes cannot wait until the mythical point that liberal forces are somehow ready to compete. Unless they compete, they’ll never be ready. That this risks Islamist gains in the short-run is true but it’s not as if there will be free and open elections anywhere in the Middle East in the foreseeable future (other than in Iraq, a point I’ll come back to below). Reforming political party laws and the laws of association, for example, could lead to the creation of a greater number of alternatives so that my young Egyptian friends would have somewhere else to cast their protest votes. The present danger from my perspective therefore is not “one vote, one time.” Rather, it is the prospect of Iranian-style revolutions taking place across the region when economic dislocation coupled with intolerable levels of repression finally lead liberals and other non-Islamists to embrace the Islamists parties as the vanguard of the opposition.
This is one of the reasons I did not sign the letter when asked to do so. (The other was the fact that I thought the letter went too far in criticizing the Bush administration’s democratization efforts, efforts I supported.) Rather than sticking to the general case for advancing democracy in the region, the letter placed too much emphasis, in my view, on opening space for the Islamist opposition. As my anecdote above makes clear the Islamists are not the ones who need help; they are, in fact, the only ones the governments allow, for their own reasons, to compete with them.
The letter would have secured my support had it concluded that the United States should prioritize its political engagement and support for non-Islamist parties. That would not mean ignoring Islamist parties altogether. Already the United States engages with Islamist parties from the PJD in Morocco to Islah in Yemen, not to mention the entire spectrum of Islamist parties in Iraq. The United Sates, however, should be under no obligation to support political parties that refuse to acknowledge universally accepted human rights related to minorities, women or religious tolerance. To do so, moreover, undercuts the very people we should be trying to support.
Today in Iraq, after years of violence and dislocation, we see a hopeful, if still evolving trend. The United States, while insisting on elections, has also been encouraging national accommodation and an end to sectarianism. During the most recent elections, none of the 400-plus political entities, even the Islamist ones, ran under the slogan “Islam is the Solution.” To do so, they knew, would alienate voters who were sick to death of empty slogans. They wanted services delivered. They wanted stronger central government. They wanted an end to sectarian politics. Hopefully, the political zeitgeist that seems to be evolving in Iraq along these lines will culminate in fulsome fashion in the parliamentary elections later this year. The United States and the international community should do everything to ensure those elections are conducted transparently and are as free and fair as possible. They should not, however, shy away from expressing clearly their hopes for the further maturation of the polity—and a further step away from sectarian, Islamist politics.
J. Scott Carpenter is a member of MESH.
Michael Rubin, Tamara Cofman Wittes, and J. Scott Carpenter have raised important aspects of the debate regarding Islamists, and I must admit that there were important differences among the signatories of the CSID letter on this point. Some believe that the United States should begin a broad engagement with all Islamist movements, including Hamas and Hezbollah, no matter how extreme their ideology or violent their methods. I disagree with them, but I do believe it is impossible to promote democracy while advocating the exclusion of all Islamists. I don’t think it is the job of the United States to engage in any sort of grand dialogue with Islamists, but I do think U.S. diplomats should speak with non-violent Islamists just as they speak with other opposition groups and that American NGOs should continue to include such Islamists in democracy promotion programs alongside liberals and others.
I also want to point out that this conversation has gone down the Islamist rabbit hole, while ignoring what are probably more significant factors in the Obama administration’s jettisoning of the freedom agenda. One seems to be the persistent idea that the United States cannot promote democracy and Arab-Israeli peace at the same time. Where this idea comes from I am not entirely sure. For example, with Egypt, at no time did Mubarak withdraw or threaten to withdraw cooperation on Arab-Israeli issues during the years (2003-05) in which the Bush administration nudged him on democracy issues. As long as U.S. policy promotes peaceful, gradual reform and not regime change, Arab governments will cooperate with us on other issues when it is in their interests to do so.
And what about the costs of not promoting democracy? Has no one yet learned the lesson of the 1990s, when the Clinton administration allowed Arafat to undermine the institutions of a nascent Palestinian democracy in the vain hope that it would be easier to make a peace deal with a single autocratic leader? This is an issue that needs at least as much discussion as that of what to do about Islamists.
Michele Dunne is a member of MESH.
J. Scott Carpenter makes an excellent point. But does anyone believe that, in the absence of U.S. troops, Iraq would not have been plunged into an Islamist nightmare? By every indicator, Iranians (at least, urban Iranians) are fed up with the Islamic Republic. But can they undo it? And if Egypt is overtaken by a Khomeini-style revolution because of economic stress and repression, maybe Iran will be overtaken by something in the reverse direction for the same reasons. It would be most ironic if a decade from now, we have headed back to the future, namely, an anti-American (Nasser) regime in Cairo and a pro-American one (the Shah) in Tehran.
Harvey Sicherman is a member of MESH.
Michele Dunne makes excellent points, but let me raise two questions.
First, what would have happened had the United States insisted on Yasir Arafat running a more democratic system? Presumably, he would have refused and the United States would have been pressed to acquiesce in order to make the peace process work. Of course, the United States would have been portrayed as reactionary, imperialistic, and anti-Palestinian for even asking. There would have been few moderates to appreciate it, and it is doubtful any moderate party would have appeared with any support. The most likely result would have been a faster rise of Hamas.
Second, what does it mean to have contacts with non-violent Islamist groups? The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood does advocate and support violence, though not necessarily on Egyptian soil. Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood would be a better candidate in theory, but it supports Hamas and presumably such contacts might destabilize the Jordanian regime, a very dangerous outcome.
These are very difficult moral and political questions. I would love to be able to agree with an emphasis on democracy expansion, but it simply does seem too counterproductive. There are, however, two basic themes that should be stressed in U.S. policy: first, opposition to the repression of dissidents who neither practice nor advocate violence; and second, support for basic human rights including trade union and women’s rights, freedom speech, freedom of worship, etc.
Barry Rubin is a member of MESH.
I have participated in the activities of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy for some years and have gotten into some spats in defending it. To my disappointment, however, I could not sign the open letter, much as I think we should raise a cry against Obama’s abandonment of the freedom agenda. Much of the debate above about Islamists misses the point: this whole issue was inappropriate to the letter. The problem of what democrats should do in situations where parties with dubious democratic convictions command strong electoral support is an old one that admits of no satisfactory solution. People who believe that the United States should promote democracy may disagree about it. It was wrong for the drafters to include a position on that issue in this statement.
But there is something more important that is wrong with this statement. From start to finish, it speaks as if the tensions between the United States and the Islamic world are the fault of the United States. Nothing could be further from the truth. The United States has always offered a hand of friendship to Muslims, as to everyone else. But vast parts of the Muslim world are hostile to America, some violently hostile. To be sure, some of this hostility stems from American policies, but that does not mean that those policies are wrong. The most potent of these neuralgic issues is America’s support of Israel’s right to exist. Another reason for the hostility is the deep strain of prejudice against Christians and Jews still at work in the Muslim world.
Moreover, the support of U.S. governments for dictatorial regimes is not the reason those regimes exist. The reverse is true. Because the Muslim world consists almost entirely of dictatorial regimes, and because America has always sought friendly relations with the Muslim world, it perforce found itself having to embrace autocrats. In fact, with the exception of Saudi Arabia, all of the most repressive and unspeakable regimes in the region—Syria, Libya, Sudan, Iraq (under Saddam)—have been violently anti-American, and the United States has returned their hostility. It is odd that this statement singles out four countries by name (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia), while failing to name the more egregious ones. Odd, too, that it fails to consider the impact of American influence in making the pro-American regimes less odious than the anti-American ones.
The stark absence of freedom and democracy in the Muslim world is not America’s fault. It reflects the pathologies that abide in these societies, the Middle East in particular. (The non-Middle Eastern Muslim states also lag in freedom and democracy, but not so severely.) One salient feature of those pathologies is the absence of self-criticism and the common habit of blaming everyone else (djinns, Jews, the Evil Eye, Americans) for one’s own problems. By pandering to this self-destructive syndrome, this statement does a disservice to the cause of democracy in the Muslim world.
Joshua Muravchik is a member of MESH.
Barry Rubin and Josh Muravchik raise important points, and I agree with some of what they said and disagree with some.
First, to Barry’s points. In light of the tragic developments in Palestinian politics over the last eight years, it is understandable that he would assume that things were fated to go this way and nothing the United States could have done would have made a difference. But I disagree. The best example I can give is that of the set of basic laws passed by the Palestinian Legislative Council in 1997, which Arafat refused to ratify until 2002, thereby seriously undermining the authority of the elected PLC. The United States decided not to press Arafat, saving its pressure for matters relating to the negotiations with Israel.
So what do we have by 2006? A secular Palestinian leadership that has completely lost its legitmacy because it failed either to get a state through negotiations or to deliver decent governance in the territories under its control. I don’t want to get into the long argument here about whether the peace process of the 1990s was viable and could have produced an agreement. But I think that the United States could at least have insisted that the Palestinian Authority under Arafat deliver decent governance and allow the institutions of a nascent state to develop. I disagree that Arafat could have refused—more or less all his funding was coming from the United States and Europe. And the Palestinian public would have supported those sorts of demands.
One quick note on contacts with groups such as the Egyptian or Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood, who do not themselves use violence but support its use by Hamas. I agree this is problematic, but isn’t it also true that many governments in the region—let’s say Turkey and Qatar, for example—take similar positions toward the legitimacy of Hamas’s use of violence? Yet we do not see such positions, however much we disagree with them, as reason not to talk to them.
Regarding Josh’s point, I agree that it is not the fault of the United States that Arab countries have authoritarian governnments and I agree that (with rare exceptions) the United States has to deal with the governments that are there. But would Josh also agree that our close relationships with authoritarian governments cause a great deal of anti-American sentiment? And that the United States should temper its necessary, practical dealings with such governments with some degree of incentives and pressure for them to give their citizens their rights? The point of the CSID letter was not to assign blame for the ills of the Arab world, but to press the Obama administration to think about how the United States can use its influence in a positive way.
Michele Dunne is a member of MESH.