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REALPOLITIK OF DEMOCRATIC
REVOLUTION
Part 2: The Bush
vision
By Henry C K Liu
Part 1: The Philippines revisited
United States President George W
Bush has built his new policy of world democratic
revolution on the assumption that democracy in foreign
lands would automatically welcome US imperialism in the
name of capitalistic free trade. In the Middle East, in
countries such as Saudi Arabia, the native land of Osama
bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11,
2001, or even Egypt, democracy, if allowed to be
practiced as a free political process that reflects
popular opinion and historical conditions, will likely
be problematic to US regional and global interests,
which includes its and its allies' 
dependence on
low-cost imported oil. The US has repeatedly tried to
topple democratically elected governments, the latest
example being the Bush White House's efforts to engineer
a coup in Venezuela.
In his speech to the
National Endowment for Democracy this month, Bush paid
homage to former US president Ronald Reagan and his
1980s Westminster Abbey invocations of freedom's
allegedly unstoppable momentum against Soviet communism.
All through the Cold War, while both camps claimed to
defend freedom and their own version of democracy, such
noble values were in short supply in practice not just
in the Soviet bloc, but also, as Bush acknowledged, in
the so-called free world.
The Reagan
administration was as much surprised by the sudden
implosion of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as
anyone else, notwithstanding its manipulative
exploitation of dissidents and democratic opposition
movements in the Soviet Union and across Central and
Eastern Europe, turning them from national-liberation
movements into Cold War agents to serve US geopolitical
interests. Many of these dissidents, hailed as heroic
freedom fighters during the Cold War, were promptly
forgotten by Washington as soon as the Cold War ended.
Others became terrorists against their former
supporters, drawing on skills taught by the US Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA). Washington's willingness to
outspend Moscow on nuclear and conventional arms and to
maintain strong North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) capabilities were the key factors in bankrupting
the Soviet Union, not US democracy.
Defending
global US interests in the name of democracy, however
conveniently defined, in countries already democratic is
hard enough, but it is a cakewalk compared with trying
to create new democratic nations, through invasion and
occupation, in societies culturally hierarchical, with
little democratic heritage in the Western mode. Bush now
declares a theme of freedom through peace: "A global
nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union ended peacefully,
as did the Soviet Union. The nations of Europe are
moving toward unity, not dividing into armed camps and
descending into genocide." Yet in the next breath, he
declares a theme of imposing freedom through war: "Every
nation has learned, or should have learned, an important
lesson: Freedom is worth fighting for, dying for and
standing for, and the advance of freedom leads to
peace."
Freedom is worth fighting for and dying
for to nationalist freedom fighters, not to
expeditionary troops in foreign lands in the absence of
an opposing army. Freedom dies with foreign occupation
and peace is shattered by war. The historical fact is
that the US won the Cold War not through invasion or
occupation, or nuclear holocaust, but through a
long-term test of economic endurance by bankrupting the
USSR in an exorbitant arms race. Since no country is
seriously interested in engaging in a new arms race with
the US, freedom is now redefined by Bush as freedom to
impose US will on a new world order.
Bush also
admitted to a historic failure in US policy. Over the
past 60 years, the US has sought geopolitical stability
through anti-communist regimes that did not set liberty
as a priority. But since September 11, Bush has
repeatedly chosen security over freedom, adopting the
same garrison-state mentality that pushed the Soviet
Union toward self-destruction. To support its war in
Afghanistan, the US set up military bases in Central
Asia the same way it allied with undemocratic
anti-communist regimes in its strategy of containment
during the Cold War. The US has orchestrated a worldwide
crackdown on terrorism with a strategy that promises to
swell the ranks of terrorists further.
Bush
stressed that he was not prescribing any set formula for
democracy for the Middle East, which must be home-grown.
Yet the US has treated freedom fighters either as US
operatives against other governments or as deadly
enemies against the US. Most Arabs view US promotion of
democracy as hypocrisy for its endorsement of Israel's
wholesale abuse of Palestinian rights.
Bush's
speech reflected the "transformationalist" agenda
embraced by Condoleezza Rice, his national security
adviser, who in August set out US ambitions to remake
the Middle East along neo-conservatives lines by using
US military power to advance democracy and free markets.
It is a policy for political transformation of Arab
countries deemed vital to victory in the "war on
terrorism".
The president went on to say that
the US has adopted "a new policy" for the Middle East
and singled out, as countries that must change, not just
traditional US adversaries such as Syria and Iran, but
allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The president's
vision was an attempt to fuse US ambitions in the
Islamic world - new benign, secular governments in Iraq
and Afghanistan; an Arab-Israeli peace based on roadmap
diplomacy; as well as political and economic openings in
a wide swath of Islamic countries from North Africa to
South Asia - with the wider rubric of promoting
democracy around the world, including socialist China.
Bush pledged a new momentum to foster broad change
comparable to the end of communism in Eastern Europe,
implying a long-range agenda to dismember China in the
name of self-determination of national minorities.
In keeping with the Trotskyite pedigree of US
neo-conservatism that has assumed the role of
presidential tutor, Bush, the simple student, is
committing the US to nothing less than a Trotskyite
world revolution of democracy and free markets, instead
of a Stalinist strategy of capitalism in one country.
Unfortunately, freedom cannot come in the form of guided
missiles delivered by Black Hawk helicopters and
democracy in distant lands cannot be created from
fielding candidates nominated by Washington,
notwithstanding Trotsky's historic role as father of the
Red Army.
"The United States has adopted a new
policy: a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle
East. This strategy requires the same persistence and
energy and idealism we have shown before. And it will
yield the same results," Bush vowed. The president used
postwar Germany and Japan as examples to prove his
point. Even though both Germany and Japan had strong
democratic traditions prior to being taken over by
fascist parties after World War I, the early election
returns in both countries after World War II so favored
socialist candidates that US occupation authorities
quickly had to release fascist war prisoners from jail
and back them with funds and political support to save
both Japan and West Germany from democratically elected
leftist governments. In Japan, the US kept the Emperor
despite his less-than-titular role in the planning and
persecution of the war. There was no regime change in
Japan as in Bush's aim for the "axis of evil".
In their book Gold Warriors: America's Secret
Recovery of Yamashita's Gold, Sterling and Peggy
Seagrave detailed how the US government sought to
exonerate the emperor and his imperial relatives from
any responsibility for the war. By 1948, it was seeking
to restore the wartime ruling class to positions of
power (Japan's wartime minister of munitions, Nobusuke
Kishi, for example, was prime minister from 1957-60).
The US keeps many of its archives concerned with postwar
Japan highly classified, in violation of its own laws.
John Foster Dulles, president Harry Truman's special
envoy to Japan charged with ending the occupation, wrote
the peace treaty of 1951 in such a way that most former
prisoners of war (POWs) and civilian victims of Japan
are prevented from obtaining any form of compensation
from either the Japanese government, which confiscated
their wealth, or private Japanese corporations, which
profited from their slave labor. He did so in perfect
secrecy and forced the other Allies to accept his draft
(except for China and Russia, which did not sign).
Almost as soon as the war was over, US forces
began to discover stupendous caches of Japanese war
treasure. General Douglas MacArthur, in charge of the
occupation, reported finding "great hoards of gold,
silver, precious stones, foreign postage stamps,
engraving plates and ... currency not legal in Japan".
Leaving uninvestigated, by US policy, the official theft
perpetrated by the Japanese occupation authorities in
China, US occupation officials, in the name of law and
order, nevertheless arrested underworld boss Yoshio
Kodama, who had worked in China during the war, selling
opium and supervising the collection and shipment to
Japan of strategic industrial metals such as tungsten,
titanium and platinum. Japan was by far the largest
opium procurer in Asia throughout the first half of the
20th century, initially in its colony of Korea and then
in Manchuria, which it seized in 1931. Kodama returned
to Japan after the war immensely rich. Before going to
prison he transferred most of his booty to Ichiro
Hatoyama and Ichiro Kono, conservative politicians who
used the proceeds to finance the newly created Liberal
Party, precursor of the Liberal Democratic Party that
has ruled Japan almost uninterruptedly since 1949. When
Kodama was released from prison, also in 1949, he went
to work for the CIA and later became the chief agent in
Japan for the Lockheed Aircraft Co, bribing and
blackmailing politicians to buy the Lockheed F-104
fighter and the L-1011 airliner. With his stolen wealth,
underworld ties and history as a supporter of
militarism, Kodama became one of the godfathers of
pro-American one-party rule in Japan.
He was not
alone in his war profiteering. One of the Seagraves'
more controversial contentions is that the looting of
Asia took place under the supervision of the imperial
household. This contradicts the American fiction that
the emperor was a pacifist and a mere figurehead
observer of the war. The Seagraves convincingly argue
that after Japan's full-scale invasion of China on July
7, 1937, Emperor Hirohito appointed one of his brothers,
Prince Chichibu, to head a secret organization called
Kin No Yuri (Golden Lily) whose function was to
ensure that contraband was properly accounted for and
not diverted by military officers or other insiders,
such as Kodama, for their own enrichment. Putting an
imperial prince in charge was a guarantee that everyone,
even the most senior commanders, would follow orders and
that the emperor personally would become immensely rich.
The emperor also posted Prince Tsuneyoshi
Takeda, a first cousin, to the staff of the Kwantung
Army in Manchuria and later as his personal liaison
officer to the Saigon headquarters of General Count
Hisaichi Terauchi, to supervise looting and ensure that
the proceeds were shipped to Japan in areas under
Terauchi's control. Although assigned to Saigon, Takeda
worked almost exclusively in the Philippines as second
in command to Chichibu. Hirohito named Prince Yasuhiko
Asaka, his uncle, to be deputy commander of the Central
China Area Army, in which capacity he commanded the
final assault on Nanking, the Chinese capital, between
December 2 and December 6, 1937, and allegedly gave the
order to "kill all captives". The Japanese removed some
6,000 tons of gold from the Chinese government treasury.
All three princes were graduates of the military academy
and all three survived the war with no consequences.
On orders from Washington, the gold from several
Golden Lily vaults in the Philippines was trucked to
warehouses at the US bases. According to the Seagraves,
financial experts from the newly formed CIA used a
Philippine operative by the name of Santa Romana to
deposit the gold in 176 reliable banks in 42 different
countries to keep the identity of the true owners
secret. Once the gold was in their vaults, the banks
would issue certificates that are even more negotiable
than the dollar, being backed by gold itself. With this
rich source of cash, the CIA set up slush funds to
influence politics in Japan, Greece, Italy, Britain,
Australia and many other places around the world. For
example, money from what was called the M-Fund (named
after Major-General William Marquat of MacArthur's
staff) was secretly employed to pay for Japan's initial
rearmament after the outbreak of the Korean War, since
the Japanese Diet refused to appropriate money for the
purpose on the ground it was unconstitutional. So much
for Japanese democracy ordained by Washington.
Going on to Baghdad
Even moderate
Arabs were reported to have greeted the Bush speech with
scorn, noting that he did not mention the Israeli
occupation of Palestinian territory or his
still-unexplained decision to wage undeclared war on
Iraq. They felt that Bush was simply shoring up domestic
acceptance of his troubled Iraq policy and his stalled
global "war on terrorism" with high-sounding principles
to improve his chances of re-election next November.
Bush's speech reflected the view of
neo-conservative policy wonks in his administration that
a strong unilateral foreign policy based on extremist
ideology and backed by overwhelming force is right for
the US as the world's sole superpower. Yet democracy is
merely a political process toward a number of possible
alternative social orders, not a religious attainment in
itself. Its desirability is measured by the effect the
democratic process has on people's lives and welfare and
on peace in the world. A decision to wage war does not
make it acceptable simply because it is democratically
derived. Democracy can fail, and has done so in the
past, as in cases of the democratic election of leaders
turned dictators.
Democracy cannot be imposed on
a people by armed invasion and occupation, nor can it
operate without real freedom of the press, free from
control by the moneyed class. Many wars have been fought
among countries with democratic governments in the West.
The British Empire rationalized its existence behind the
mask of British democracy. Democracy in the Third World
will not necessarily support imperialism or capitalism,
except in those locations already thoroughly victimized
by the cultural hegemony of imperialism. It is also
highly questionable whether political democracy is
possible without economic democracy. Freedom from want
precedes all other forms of freedom.
Bush's
faith in the ability of the US to extirpate tyranny and
implant freedom in the Middle East departs from
well-established US policy, which did not always profess
belief in the region's democratic potential, as Robert
Blecher, professor of history at the University of
Richmond, observed in his essay "Intellectuals,
Democracy and American Empire" last March. Blecher
pointed out that at the time of the 1991 Gulf War,
Mideast experts in the US such as Bernard Lewis and
Daniel Pipes supported the first Bush administration's
position that the US should not aim to democratize the
Middle East.
Colin Powell, as chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff in the administration of president
George Bush Sr, 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. 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 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," he said to laughter from the audience.
A decade later, the US has "gone on to Baghdad"
and now is looking for Thomas Jefferson. And no one is
laughing. Saddam has yet to get hit by a bus, not even a
Hummer or a guided missile. Democracy had not figured
high on the list of US priorities in foreign policy for
the past decade or even most of the past five. After
promising democratic reforms in return for US backing,
the al-Sabah family of Kuwait failed to reinstate the
constitution, delayed elections for the National
Assembly and still does not permit women to vote. United
Press International reported on July 5, 1991, that when
questioned about the ruling family's poor record, the
elder 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, was quoted: "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'."
James Schlesinger, a former defense secretary
and the US's first energy secretary, on numerous
occasions clearly defined the US position on democracy
in the Middle East: that the US had no serious intention
of changing the political system of Saudi Arabia. Daniel
Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum and founder of
Campus Watch, a website dedicated to policing Middle
East scholars against unacceptable views, wrote in the
European edition of the Wall Street Journal on January
23, 1991, that Saddam's successor would be someone in
the military. Succession would be based on power, Pipes
predicted, not democratic principles, and a stable,
defensible and non-bellicose Iraq was the best
conceivable outcome. 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 was now (in 1991) up to the Iraqis
themselves to dispose of Saddam and his evil clique.
Such a result was likely, Pipes thought. On the first
anniversary of the first Gulf War, Pipes inaccurately
predicted in the Philadelphia Inquirer on January 16,
1992, that Desert Storm was likely to lead to Saddam's
eventual overthrow by the Iraqi people. Events turned
out quite the opposite.
Like Powell, Pipes in
late 1991 preferred to see Saddam 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?" These cans are now wide open, and according to
Bush the younger, out will pop the worms of democracy
and freedom.
The only way to avoid those
consequences of toppling Saddam, 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 [1991]. [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."
A decade after the
1991 Gulf War, Pipes has abandoned his previous concerns
about the complications that would arise from a US
occupation of Iraq. In an article "The risks are
overrated", in the New York Post on December 3, 2001, he
urged Bush to move on Baghdad. In 2002, on Buchanan
and Press on MSNBC, 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." In an article in Asia
Times Online recently, Pipes wrote: "However matters
develop, this gamble is typical of a president
exceptionally willing to take risks to shake up the
status quo" (Bush and a democratic Middle
East, November 12).
Risk is an issue
of probability much analyzed by financial market
participants. There is a line beyond which risk turns
into suicide, such as jumping out a window from the 60th
floor without a parachute. The democracies in Europe are
among the most vocal opposition to the US invasion of
Iraq. Even Turkey, a democratic, secular Islamic state,
faced internal popular resistance to its government's
effort to support US plans in the Iraq war. This new
talk of democracy is seen around the world as a device
for creating client states that will manipulate popular
will to further US interests. Douglas Feith, now an
under secretary of defense, recommended to an American Enterprise Institute
(AEI) conference on October 14, 1998, that the US should
push a notion of democracy built around limited
government and personal freedoms, not majority rule. The
Bush administration, despite all its rhetoric on
freedom, is moving toward intrusive government and
curtailed personal freedom in the name of national
security.
Blecher also recounted Richard Haass,
director of the State Department's Policy Planning
Staff, as having described in 1997 the notion that the
US would be the world's only great power as beyond
reach. "It simply is not doable." In terms of democracy,
he stated forthrightly in a speech titled "Towards
Greater Democracy in the Muslim World", given at the
Council on Foreign Relations: "Primacy cannot be
confused with hegemony. The United States cannot compel
others to become more democratic." After 2002, he became
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."
Robert S Greenberger, in a Wall
Street Journal report on October 8, 1990, headlined
"Calls for democracy in the Middle East are creating a
dilemma for White House", described Fouad Ajami, another
Princeton-trained Mideast expert, as having 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." Yet 13 years later, Blecher found Ajami
advocating precisely such an injection. In a recent
article in Foreign Affairs, Ajami rejected the restraint
with which the US conducted itself in 1991, arguing that
the dread of nation-building must be cast aside. Ajami
threw in his lot with those who envisage a more profound
US role in Arab political life: the spearheading of a
reformist project that seeks to modernize and transform
the Arab political landscape.
Our choice is
clear
Bernard Lewis in 1990, laying the roots for
Samuel Huntington's later theme, wrote that the world
faced a clash of civilizations that pitted
Judeo-Christian culture against Muslim culture. Yet
Islam is not monolithic, Lewis pointed out, as
fundamentalism is 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." Blecher saw
violent Islam as specifically having shaped Lewis's
recent cultural theorizing and authorizing his
prescriptions for US policy, yet Lewis was more catholic
in presenting the dilemmas that confronted the region in
the wake of the 1991 Gulf War: "There 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," Lewis
wrote in "The roots of Muslim rage", Atlantic Monthly,
September 1990.
In The Arabs in History,
Lewis wrote in 1950 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,
or meeting the West on terms of equal cooperation.
Lewis wrote in the Wall Street Journal on April
11, 1991: "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." And not a gift from
Washington.
Blecher saw Lewis as updating the
decline theory, that is, the notion that the Ottoman
Empire was once a great civilization but began a steady
and uninterrupted decline in the 16th century. In
Lewis's view, Arab problems of readjustment (1950) and
their spiral of hate and rage (2003) stem from their
inability to cope with the modern world. Yet in reality,
it is not modernity that Arabs cannot cope with, but the
Western abduction of modernity.
US hegemony, for
Lewis, offers the hope of rescuing the fallen Arab
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 is
pulling the Middle East downward. George W Bush
articulated this historical mission. For Lewis and Bush,
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 -
never mind that the ideas came in the form of cultural
imperialism, the inspiration in the form of Calvinist
capitalism and the means in the form of military
invasion. Left to their own devices, Arabs are destined
to remain in the misery they have chosen for themselves.
There is an obvious gap in Lewis's
interpretation of history. If four centuries of Western
intervention in the Middle East did not bring
modernization and prosperity, where is the logic that a
few more decades of US hegemony will reverse the
historical trajectory? Lewis does not see misery in the
Middle East as the result of a century of Western
imperialism forcibly imposed on the Arab nation. This
explains why Lewis wrote in "Islam and liberal
democracy: A historical overview", Journal of Democracy
(July 2, 1996), when internal opposition constituted the
only possible path to toppling Saddam, that in Iraq and
Syria, an overthrow of the dictators was unlikely to
lead to the immediate establishment of a workable
democracy.
Lewis offers a raison d'etre
for US hegemony in the Middle East. Paul Wolfowitz, the
Bush administration's most vocal proponent for toppling
Saddam, 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." In 1998, Lewis signed an open letter to
president Bill Clinton that called for the toppling of
Saddam 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 ultra-hawk Richard Perle, but also Bush
appointees who have since shaped the administration's
policy: Elliott Abrams, Richard Armitage, John Bolton,
Douglas Feith, Zalmay Khalilzad, Donald Rumsfeld and
Paul Wolfowitz, a who's who list of key architects in
Bush's wars on Iraq and Afghanistan.
Lewis was
invited to participate in a meeting of the Defense
Advisory Board on September 19, 2001, a week after the
September 11 events, and subsequent meetings with Bush
and Vice President Dick Cheney. Supporting Wolfowitz's
agenda to attack Iraq, Lewis was reported by the Wall
Street Journal 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,
promoting Iraqi oppositional groups as politically
viable, and as the best hope for stable democracy in the
Middle East. Anthony Lewis reported that Bernard Lewis
told Bush and Cheney, and other officials, that the time
had come to act for the peoples of Iraq. By late 2002,
as the US war machine geared up, he told a conference at AEI that he was
cautiously optimistic about the prospect for developing
a democratic regime in Iraq. In the April 7, 2002,
Jerusalem Post, Lewis was quoted as being very
optimistic about a postwar Iraq: "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."
Blecher viewed Lewis as
having 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." Writing in Forward on October 11, 2002, Lewis
asserted that the US could not simply install an
American-style democracy; it was unrealistic to think
that a political system can be engineered overnight,
especially if it appeared to be the result of "forced
change by an external force". Blecher continued: "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."
Still, Lewis has not provided any justification that the
invasion and occupation of Iraq has accelerated this
possibly century-long process of indigenous choice.
Blecher observed that "like the stewards of US
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 [as reported in the March 14, 2003, Los Angeles
Times], 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 to ensure its preferred outcome.
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 as smooth as their optimistic rhetoric implies.
When Under Secretary 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' [Haaretz, February 18].
Democracy, it seems, will grow out of the barrel of a
gun," Blecher mused.
Yet as Blecher noted, "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 that the US should push a
notion of democracy built around limited government and
personal freedoms, not majority rule. In other words,
build a world order of weak minority governments around
the world unable to oppose US hegemony. 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'. 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."
Blecher noted that
"conservative intellectuals in the US, for their part,
have not hesitated to make the right, if Faustian
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. 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." And much has happened to
keep democracy buried for a long time.
Americans
are also facing a critical choice. As former vice
president Al Gore said: "The question before us could be
of no greater moment: Will we continue to live as a
people under the rule of law as embodied in our
constitution? Or will we fail future generations, by
leaving them a constitution far diminished from the
charter of liberty we have inherited from our forebears?
Our choice is clear."
Can a people promote
freedom around the world by limited freedom at home? The
people of the world would welcome a global democratic
revolution, but one that the neo-conservative in
Washington may not find appetizing. The US-led West is
also faced with a critical choice of whether to create a
new equitable world order in which terrorism will be
deprived of rationalization, or to continue to mask
injustice with rhetoric of democracy and freedom and to
try to control terrorism with fear generated by
overwhelming force. It is time to reverse the historical
trajectory of oppression.
Henry C K
Liu is chairman of the New York-based Liu Investment
Group.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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