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COMMENTARY
The perils of managed
democracy
By Ramzy Baroud
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's
highly publicized tour in the Middle East, Asia
and Europe carried with it little or no surprises.
But even then, one must not altogether write off
the possibility of some lessons to be learned,
even if indirectly.
The Middle East leg of
Rice's journey was saturated with the same kind of
duplicitous rhetoric that defined her legacy
during President George W Bush's first term in
office.
She verbally reprimanded and
threatened Syria and Iran for not fully and
unconditionally embracing democratic reforms,
while expressing "encouragement" regarding the
Palestinian, Iraqi and Lebanese endeavor for
democracy, following the supposed democratic
elections enjoyed by these countries.
However, those who are even slightly
familiar with the logic of US foreign policy in
the Middle East need not bother to decode Rice's
rhetoric or the rhetoric of any US official when
it comes to the Middle East and the US's
substantial interests there. US allies in the
region - ie those who unreservedly labor to serve
and cater to American economic, military and
strategic interests - are either entirely immune
to any criticism or, if criticism is inevitable,
their most horrific sins are curtailed to barely
warrant a few mild words of censure.
On
the other hand, the sins of America's foes are
augmented, embellished and often right out
fabricated to necessitate diplomatic pressure,
economic sanctions and as a "last resort", war.
Iraq was an example of the latter, while Iran's
current political attitude toward US interests in
the region is qualifying it for the important,
albeit ominous role of being the Middle East's
most formidable bogeyman which, in one way or
another, must be taken down.
This logic,
simply put, is absurd. While there is no doubt
that both Egypt and Iran are redoubtable violators
of human rights, who can possibly contest that
Iran, despite all its blunders, has taken more
steps toward democracy than has Egypt? This is not
to deny that Iran's democracy will never be
complete without an open and intimidation-free
electoral system, which impedes the state's
meddling regarding who is qualified and who is not
to run for parliament or for office, what party
agenda is acceptable and what is not, and so
forth. Nonetheless, civil society in Iran and the
direct involvement of the populace in determining
the country's internal affairs, despite its many
hindrances, is vastly more advanced than that of
Egypt, where mass arrests, crackdowns and torture
are all too common.
Yet while Iran
received disproportionately higher criticism than
any other country during Rice's trip, Bush's
closest trustee strangely declared that Egypt's
President Hosni Mubarak "had unlocked the door for
change", even though, ironically, the Egyptian
president has ruled in Egypt for 23 years and
fully intends to carry out another term of
authoritarian rule.
This is, of course,
another "encouraging" sign according to the flimsy
logic of the Bush administration's newly forged
doctrine on how to manage the Middle East.
Washington's new style manual is based on its
comprehension of two inevitable scenarios. First,
there is the United Nations-sponsored Arab Human
Rights Development Report of 2004, which warns
that "power will be transformed through armed
violence" if Arab states don't adopt serious
political reforms and significantly raise the
margin of freedom in their societies.
But
the second scenario is equally harmful to US
Middle East policy, for a genuine democracy will
most likely bring to power the repressed anti-US
forces dotting the Arab world. After all,
opposition groups within Egypt, which are very
much in favor of democracy, reforms and civil
society, refused to meet with Rice during her
stopover in Egypt.
"We are against the US
policies in the region and we cannot have any
negotiations with them, and all the opposition
parties in the country agree on what I'm saying,"
Georges Isaac, a co-founder of the Egyptian
Movement for Change, known as Kefaya (Enough),
told Arab News. "If we want political reform to be
implemented in the country, we want to do it
ourselves, not to be imposed or to be even
discussed with Rice."
Washington's
undeclared new dogma professes a new Middle East
policy that works both toward avoiding complete
political meltdown, chaos and violence throughout
the Arab world - evidently very harmful
considering the US's disastrous debacle in Iraq -
while trying to maintain first-class rapport with
friendly regimes; key phrase: managed democracy.
Managed democracy is as superficial as it
is cosmetic, but it can work miracles, or so
Washington believes. Not that such democracy is a
new phenomenon. It was, in fact, the subject of
awesome experiments immediately following the end
of World War II, initiated in Europe, extending to
Central America and was later utilized in Eastern
Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But nothing shall amount to the challenge
facing the US government in managing democracy in
the Middle East, not only because of the
formidable task of cosmetically reforming a
plethora of countries all at once, but most
urgently because of the zero credibility that
Washington enjoys anywhere in the Arab or Muslim
world.
Washington seems to be counting on
the fact that the Arab peoples are so desperately
fed up with their governments they are willing to
forge alliances with whomever to get rid of these
oppressive and degenerate regimes. True, but what
Washington is failing to factor in is the fact
that, according to common political dogmas in the
Middle East, the oppressiveness of the regimes can
hardly be separated from Washington's own regional
designs that compelled a decades-long sinful
matrimony between oppressive rulers and equally
domineering American foreign policy.
Thus,
an American withdrawal from Iraq and an end to the
unbalanced policy toward the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict are often amalgamated with the Arab
peoples' most pertinent demands for political
rights, human rights and civil liberties. Perhaps
Washington is too arrogant to grasp this logic;
nonetheless it is prevailing and most fitting.
While Rice's Middle East trip appeared
benign and casual, in reality it was tantamount to
an official declaration of Washington's
prospective Middle East approach. This approach,
as I see it, is a blend between the US's
traditional policies of designations - friendly
allies vs evil enemies - and carefully
premeditated "democratic" reforms that uphold the
status quo without tipping the political balance
in favor of those critical of Washington's
regional role and foreign policy. And in the
Middle East, they are many.
Ramzy
Baroud, a veteran journalist, is editor in
chief of PalestineChronicle.com. He is the author
of the upcoming book, A Force to Be Reckoned
With: Writings on the Second Palestinian Uprising.
(Copyright 2005 Ramzy Baroud.) |
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