COMMENTARY Democracy a tool in neo-con
hands By Jim Lobe
Of the
delusions that US neo-conservatives perpetrated in their
drive to take the United States to war in Iraq, the most
durable has been the notion that they are committed to
the spread of Wilsonian democracy. As someone who has
watched the neo-con movement over the past 30 years or
so, I find this notion hard to accept.
My
skepticism is based not only on their obvious
selectivity. After all, one has only to look at their
support for authoritarian regimes in Uzbekistan,
Pakistan, Tunisia and Jordan - as opposed to their
eagerness to invade Iraq in the name of bringing
democratic rule there - to find some glaring
inconsistencies.
Nor is it the fact that
neo-conservatives pushed hardest for President George W
Bush to cease dealing with Yasser Arafat, who, after
all, was elected by a substantial majority of eligible
Palestinian voters on the West Bank and in Gaza, that
suggests a certain hypocrisy or blindness on the issue.
Neo-con hardliners such as Richard Perle believe
Palestinians should be denied self-determination
altogether.
Without doubt, neo-cons have long
professed a devotion to democracy. Indeed, their main
argument in favor of a US strategic alliance with Israel
- a central and persistent tenet of the neo-conservative
creed over three decades - has been the Jewish state's
status as the lone democratic outpost in a region of
seething and hate-filled Arab autocracies.
The
question, however, is whether democracy promotion,
especially in the Arab world, ranks anywhere nearly as
high in their policy priorities as their commitment to
Israel's security. And, to the extent they may perceive
a potential conflict between the two, which one are they
inclined to choose as the more important?
A
brief look at the historical record may help provide an
answer.
While the movement sprouted wings in the
late 1960s and early 1970s, as Israel found itself
increasingly isolated at the United Nations,
neo-conservatives first tasted real power under the late
US president Ronald Reagan, who was especially taken
with Jeane Kirkpatrick's attacks on his predecessor
Jimmy Carter's human-rights policies, which, according
to her, were disastrously undermining "friendly
authoritarian" regimes, such as the Shah of Iran,
Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, the military
dictatorships in South America, and even the apartheid
government of South Africa - all governments that also
enjoyed friendly relations with Israel.
Instead
of hectoring such regimes on reform, she argued,
Washington should have provided them unstinting support
as allies in the global struggle against Soviet
communism, both because Moscow was the far greater evil,
and because "authoritarian" regimes could eventually
become "democracies", while "totalitarian" ones could
not.
Reagan applied these ideas. During his
first term, Washington not only renewed military and
other forms of support to "friendly authoritarians", but
also launched the neo-con-inspired "Reagan doctrine" -
the sponsorship of right-wing "freedom fighters", such
as jihadis in Afghanistan, tribal nationalists in
Angola, and ex-National Guard in Nicaragua who generally
distinguished themselves more by fanaticism and
brutality than by the democratic arts. At the same time,
neo-cons were ecstatic about Israel's 1982 invasion of
Lebanon - not because it could further the cause
of democracy, but because it meant the expulsion of the
Palestinian Liberation Organization from Lebanon and a
decisive shift in the regional balance of power against
Soviet-backed Syria.
So if neo-cons were not big
democracy boosters during their period of greatest
influence under Reagan, when did they get religion?
Most analysts date their conversion to the
latter 1980s when the "people power" movement ousted
Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and Chilean
strongman General Augusto Pinochet was defeated in a
referendum to extend his rule. In both cases, prominent
neo-conservatives Paul Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams,
respectively, were serving at the top of the two
relevant regional State Department bureaus. Neo-con
pundits were quick to embrace these perceived deviations
from the Kirkpatrick doctrine as a necessary course
correction, particularly in light of the winding down of
the Cold War.
While Wolfowitz and Abrams sided
with those who wanted to remove the two "friendly
authoritarians", so did a significant number of
Republican lawmakers, some of them classic realists,
such as Senator Richard Lugar, who had already broken
with Reagan and the neo-cons over their support for
South Africa. In that respect, the neo-cons were as much
fellow-travelers as they were the vanguard, as they like
to claim.
That conclusion is reinforced by their
record through the 1990s. Contrary to myth, neo-cons,
including Wolfowitz, who is widely considered the most
Wilsonian on the neo-con spectrum, did not urge
president George H W Bush to plant democracy in Baghdad
during the first Gulf War in 1991. And although they did
join with liberal hawks in calling for "humanitarian
interventions" after the war and subsequently in the
Balkans, neo-cons remained well within what became the
post-Cold War realist consensus - that elected, more or
less democratic governments, so long as they were not
hostile, were to be preferred over "friendly
authoritarians".
Thus when the Algerian military
abruptly canceled elections in December 1991, neither
realists nor neo-cons objected, because the alternative
was thought likely to bring to power an Islamist
government potentially hostile to the United States, and
certainly to Israel. Indeed, in his An End to
Evil published (with co-author David Frum) in
January, Richard Perle cites Algeria as the reason he
supports "democratization" in the Middle East, rather
than "democracy" - a subtlety that would bring a smile
even to the lips of master realist Henry Kissinger.
Similarly, when the neo-cons first began
agitating for Saddam Hussein's removal in 1995-96, their
arguments were based entirely on classic
realpolitik of the kind they had used to defend
Israel's invasion of Lebanon 13 years before. Thus a
1996 task force headed by Perle and that also included
the Pentagon's current policy chief, Douglas Feith, and
David Wurmser, Middle East adviser to Vice President
Dick Cheney, argued that ousting Saddam was the key to
transforming the balance of power in the Middle East
decisively in Israel's favor, permitting it to "break"
with Oslo and dictate terms to Syria and the
Palestinians.
A follow-up paper by Wurmser
called for the region to be reorganized according to
"tribal/clan/familial alliances" that would create a
"more stable balance-of-power system". In 1998, when the
neo-cons and Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi were steamrolling
the Iraq Liberation Act through Congress, its
supporters, such as the neo-con-dominated Project for
the New American Century (PNAC), focused entirely on the
military threat posed by a rearmed Saddam. Even in the
immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, when the PNAC
warned that the failure to oust Saddam would constitute
a "decisive surrender" to international terrorism, the
democracy question simply was nowhere on the agenda.
It was only after the Afghanistan campaign to
oust the Taliban that the neo-cons finally began to
articulate the argument, denounced by one realist
strategist as "neo-crazy", that anti-American terrorism
was caused by oppressive Arab autocracies and that, by
invading and occupying the most oppressive, Iraq, the US
could create a pro-Western, democratic government in the
strategic heart of the Arab world that would in turn
provoke sweeping change throughout the region.
On the face of it, the argument has real appeal,
particularly for the more idealistic of the neo-cons,
such as Wolfowitz. To the increasingly Likudist
mainstream of the movement - such people as Perle,
Feith, Daniel Pipes, Norman Podhoretz and Michael Ledeen
- however, it must sound like a great way to rally
public opinion behind a war to shift the balance of
power in the Middle East once and for all.
(This
column was first published by the Daily Star of Beirut,
Lebanon.)
