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The beast that slouches toward
democracy
By Spengler
A
celebrated moment in US cinema had Indiana Jones
facing off an Arab swordsman of evident skill.
Jones gave the Arab a  deprecating glance,
drew his revolver and shot him dead. Put President
George W Bush in the role of the swordsman and
Hezbollah's Hasan Nasrullah in place of Indiana
Jones, and the events of March 8 in Beirut fall
into context.
No woolier idea ever found
its way into foreign policy than the premise that
democracy will promote Middle East peace. Nemesis
overtakes the tragic hero at the extreme of
hubris, and now the Bush tragedy has plunged into
its second act just when the US president was
confident that democracy would sweep through the
region (George W Bush, tragic
character, November 25, 2003).
The great slapping sound heard around
Washington last week was the shutting mouths of
conservative pundits after Hezbollah put half a
million supporters in the streets of Beirut March
8. On March 4, the Washington Post's Charles
Krauthammer bragged of "the dawn of a glorious,
delicate, revolutionary moment in the Middle
East". The National Review's John Derbyshire
opined prematurely that "this has been a bad few
weeks for us pessimists ... with 1989-style
demonstrations out in the streets of Beirut". A
prominent Bush detractor, Newsweek's Fareed
Zakaria, conceded that "Bush is right" and "may
change the world". That was then. On March 11,
Krauthammer had forgotten about the Middle East
and devoted his column to the ethics of frozen
embryos.
Hezbollah's Hasan Nasrullah has
laid a cuckoo's egg in the nest of US policy,
conjuring up the specter of a terrorist democracy.
US planners long have worried that Iraq's Islamist
al-Da'wa party might find common cause with
Hezbollah. With Da'wa chief Ibrahim Jaafari about
to become Iraq's prime minister, Lebanese
circumstances endanger the entire US venture in
Mesopotamia. Bush appears to face a tragic choice:
allow Iran to become a nuclear power with a veto
on the ground in Lebanon as well as Iraq, or use
force against Iran and its supporters. Unless Bush
is willing to use (or permit Israel to use)
nuclear weapons, the second alternative is next to
unworkable. If he chooses the first alternative,
the odds that radical Islam will triumph over the
West rise sharply.
There is a third
alternative, albeit one too terrible to enter into
Washington's present consideration, which I will
sketch out below.
Civil war in either
Lebanon or Iraq might turn into a single conflict,
given the Islamist parties' theological and
Iran-centered political connections. Nasrullah's
control of facts on the ground leaves Washington
in apparent Zugzwang, a position in which a
chess player is compelled to move, and any move
loses. That is why Washington is talking out of
both sides of its mouth about Hezbollah. Steven R
Weisman quoted an unnamed US official in the March
10 New York Times to the effect that Washington
was willing to accept Hezbollah into the Lebanese
mainstream: "Hezbollah has American blood on its
hands. They are in the same category as al-Qaeda.
The administration has an absolute aversion to
admitting that Hezbollah has a role to play in
Lebanon, but that is the path we're going down."
Tehran now feels bold enough to thumb its
nose at Washington's proposed economic bribes to
stop nuclear-fuel production. "US officials are
either unaware of the substance of the talks or
hallucinating," Sirus Naseri, a senior member of
Iran's nuclear negotiating team, told Iran's
official IRNA news agency.
The roar of the
American triumphalists left the few of us feeling
shrill and small who fear that the Islamic world
will prefer a collective identity to Western
democracy, as I wrote last week (They made a democracy and called it
peace, March 8). Among the
neo-conservatives, only Daniel Pipes, writing in
the March 8 New York Sun, offered words of
caution:
Yes, Mahmoud Abbas wishes to end the
armed struggle against Israel but his call for a
greater jihad against the "Zionist enemy" points
to his intending another form of war to destroy
Israel. The Iraqi elections are bringing Ibrahim
Jaafari, a pro-Iranian Islamist, to power.
Likewise, the Saudi elections proved a boon for
the Islamist candidates. [Egyptian President
Hosni] Mubarak's promise is purely cosmetic; but
should real presidential elections one day come
to Egypt, Islamists will probably prevail there
too. Removing Syrian control in Lebanon could
well lead to Hezbollah, a terrorist group,
becoming the dominant power there. Eliminating
the hideous Assad dynasty could well bring in
its wake an Islamist government in
Damascus. US denials of the Weisman
story ring a bit hollow, for Washington cannot
afford to take on Hezbollah without unsettling
Iraq's Shi'ites. Some reports out of Washington
allege that Nasrullah is merely the Lebanese
opposite number of the marginalized Shi'ite
radical Muqtada al-Sadr. In the fluid
circumstances of the moment Hezbollah well might
find itself closer to Da'wa. The senior Middle
East specialist of the Army War College (AWC), W
Andrew Terrill, warned in February 2004:
US forces must also emphasize their
concern about Iraqi Shi'ite groups, which may
seek to coordinate with outside radicals such as
those in Lebanon. While it may be impossible to
prevent Da'wa and Iraqi Hezbollah from seeking
theological inspiration from radical Lebanese
clerics, the formation of any kind of
operational ties should be of grave concern to
the United States [see Note
below]. And as Ashraf Fahim wrote in
Asia Times Online on March 10, "Regionally, the
group has close religious ties to Iraq's new
Shi'ite-dominated government, which makes
threatening it risky - Nasrullah studied in Najaf
with many of the Da'wa Party's clerics" (Hezbollah enters the
fray).
Terrill updated his
views in a report released by the AWC on March 5,
under the title "Strategic Implications of
Intercommunal Warfare In Iraq". I am astonished
that Terrill's study received not a single mention
in any news outlet other than this (a Google News
search turns up only the original AWC press
release). Parenthetically, the same silence
greeted another report of vast strategic
importance, namely the United Nations' "World
Population Prospects: The 2004 Revision" (see They
made a democracy and called it peace, March 8,
link above). Terrill warns:
Many Western observers reflexively
view Western-style democracy as the way to
address the divisions within Iraq society that
may lead to severe civil conflict. Nevertheless,
the birth of democracy and development of ethnic
and sectarian harmony are not always closely
related, and a number of important challenges
will have to be addressed for Iraq to evolve
into a viable democracy that protects the rights
of all religious and ethnic groups. Should
Iraqis be unable to meet the challenges of
accommodating and regulating key differences
while forming a functioning government, civil
war becomes a serious possibility. A
major concern of the US Army's senior Middle East
strategist is that:
... Civil war in Iraq will also have
important implications for Lebanon. In the event
of an Iraqi civil war, Lebanese Muslims, and
especially the numerically dominant Shi'ites,
can be expected to be concerned with the fate of
Iraq's Shi'ite community, and a few young
Shi'ite men may further choose to go to Iraq.
Leaders of the Lebanese Shi'ite militant group,
Hezbollah, have made numerous statements about
Iraq, and will probably seek to support
like-minded Shi'ite radicals in Iraq, should
civil war break out ... A circulation of
fighters could occur between Iraq and Lebanon
under conditions of protracted sectarian
fighting. Just what is it about a
civil war in Iraq or Lebanon, though, that
prejudices US strategic interests? Civil wars,
especially the prolonged and bloody wars of
attrition, benefit the outside power best equipped
to intervene (Civil war: A do-it-yourself
guide, August 29, 2003). The only chess
move on the Middle Eastern board that frees
Washington from apparent Zugzwang is to
call Nasrullah's bluff, and let him launch civil
conflict in Lebanon, taking into account contagion
in Iraq. This would create a meat-grinder on the
ground, with the object of depleting the ranks of
the militants on both sides.
Call this a
Lincolnian, rather than a Wilsonian, foreign
policy. US president Abraham Lincoln crushed his
country's slave-holding south by killing
two-fifths of southern men of military age, a
policy of attrition well understood by his
generals. "Full 300,000 of the bravest men of this
world must be killed or banished in the south
before they will think of peace, and in killing
them we must lose an equal or greater number, for
we must be the attacking party," wrote General
William Tecumseh Sherman in 1864. "Still, we as a
nation have no alternative or choice."
"Americans fail to grasp decisive
strategic issues not only because they
misunderstand other cultures, but because they
avert their gaze from the painful episodes of
their own history," I wrote in 2003 (Why radical Islam might defeat the
West, July 8). Wars do not end when
they are won, but when those who want to fight to
the death find their wish has been granted (More killing, please!,
June 12, 2003).
Note:
"The United States and Iraq's Shi'ite Clergy:
Partners or Adversaries?"Available <here>. My ATol
colleague Marc Erikson drew attention to Terrill's
work in an April 27, 2004, commentary (Deadline looming, US forces the
issue).
(Copyright 2005 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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