The Folly/Wisdom of Exporting Democracy Posted by Shadi Hamid

An article of mine on the "wisdom of exporting democracy" is out today on TomPaine.Com. For an alternative view, check out Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman's "The Folly of Exporting Democracy." I guess it's sort of a showdown between a "democracy-centric foreign policy" and "ethical realism." In any case, here's the beginning of my piece:

Some commentators —including most recently the American Prospect’s Matt Yglesias —have argued that the central problem in the Middle East is not so much its lack of democracy but, rather, “the enduring legacy of imperialism.” According to this line of reasoning, the solution to our Mideast dilemmas would be to change the policies that Middle Easterners hate the most. Unfortunately, the list of grievances is so long, that to actually redress them would, one suspects, take a very, very long time. Moreover, in a region where our vital interests are engaged, it is unlikely that an avowedly “anti-imperialist” foreign policy—whatever that might mean in practice—will stand a chance of being supported by either political party. More fundamentally, however, this diagnosis fails to grasp the real source of our difficulties in the Middle East.

It’s not so much that people are angry at us, but rather that people have no political outlet with which to express their anger in a peaceful, legitimate manner.

Even if the intractable Arab-Israeli conflict was to be solved through hands-on American diplomacy, it would be shortsighted to think that this would be the victory that some imagine it will be. For if the conflict is resolved, it does not change the fact that millions of Arabs live in humiliation, treated as little more than petty subjects, to be manipulated, controlled and repressed at will. The greatest indignities Arabs and Muslims face—the ones that, for them, are most immediate and tangible—come from their own authoritarian governments. And of course, we, in our continued support for unrepentant autocrats, are complicit.

As long as Muslims have grievances against us (and they most certainly will for the foreseeable future), then the only sustainable American response is to promote those democratic mechanisms that will absorb, temper and channel such sentiments in a constructive fashion. Only when their governments are responsive to their needs and frustrations will Muslims be able to shake off the humiliation and powerlessness which has been the prime mover of terror and extremism.

Read the whole thing here.

Comments

[stephanie]

what a great article!
I think the major piece to be addressed in the middle east is the eradication of the extreme poverty we see many of these "terrorist breeding nations" forced into. If we stuck to the Millenium Development Goals that we agreed to at a UN summit in 2000, we may not have to deal with terrorism, or a war, at all.

[Zathras]

I'd like Shadi Hamid to explain what about Arab humiliation and indignity explains Darfur. Surely here more than anywhere there is a government "responsive to Muslims' needs and frustrations." In this case, unfortunately, these are dealt with by killing other Muslims in large numbers. But among the Sudanese government's supporters I'll bet humiliation and feelings of powerlessness are down dramatically.

[Dan Kervick]

I recently replied to some of Shadi Hamid's arguments in my comment of Suzanne Nossel's recent post The Bush Doctrine: A Five Year Retrospective. Rather than cross post it here, I will just supply this link.

I think it is a mistake to regard terrorism as mainly some sort of syndrome or pathology that can be cured by providing the terrorists with "more constructive outlets" for the expression of their dissatisfaction. Most of the people using terrorism against the US regard themselves as at war with us. They have selected the tactic of terrorism, repulsive as it is, because they believe it is the most effective tactic available to them given the asymmetry in conventional power.

Consider this: In WWII the allies employed tactics against both Germany and Japan that intentionally targeted civilians. They did this because they believed it was the most effective way to win the war, and win it expeditiously. Do you think they made these decisions because they were not sufficiently democratized and lacked a more constructive outlet for their dissatisfaction with their enemies?

Before someone comes back with the usual expressions of outrage, I am not positing a moral equivalence between contemporary militant jihadism and the allied cause in World War II. But the point here is to understand causal mechanisms, and the terrorists' own motivations. If one reads the many writings produced by the jihadists, one finds that turning to terrorism was a deliberate choice. They raised the question among themselves about what tactics were acceptable, and leading clerics and movement leaders then in some cases produced essays arguing that terrorism against US citizens was a legitimate tactic in the current struggle, as they conceive it.

If my analysis is correct, the only way to diminish terrorism is either to remove the sources of the terrorists' militant dissatisfaction with the US by changing US policies in the Middle East, or else to defeat them on the battlefield - which in this case means defeating them by using some combination of intelligence, criminal prosecution, covert action and special forces missions to stay one step ahead of terrorists and kill, disable or capture them before they do damage. If, as Shadi suggests, the US is unprepared for strategic reasons to follow the former course, then it will have to be the latter.

There is little reason to think that bringing democracy to the Middle East, even if it can be done, will bring an end to Middle Eastern terrorism, since the actual terrorists - as opposed to some more moderate Islamists in the region - have been quite specific about the fact that they are not seeking democracy of any kind. They would regard these regimes as un-Islamic foreign imports, and would resist them violently, along with the backers of those regimes.

Now ending US support for certain regimes in the region may indeed help, since US support for those regimes is one of the sources of the jihadist dissatisfaction with us. In some cases, a hands-off policy might result in spontaneous eruptions of democracy; it other cases it would result in new despotisms. But unless the withdrawn US support is not temporary, and is accompanied by a general disengagement from those countries, it probably won't have the desired effect, since the jihadists aim is to end Western cultural, economic and military domination of Muslim lands.

If the US and other Western countries are determined, on the other hand, to aggressively export their political and social culture to the Middle East, to run Middle East economies, to keep Middle East oil in the hands of private Western-financed investors, and to support governments that are very unpopular in the region, especially among the jihadists, then we can expect continued violent resistance to our engagement.

[Lane Brody]

At some point the notion that a given people are not responsible for their own nation needs to die. Someone may claim the reason they are not free is the result of past wrongs and current outside support of autocratic regimes but claiming a thing does not make it so.

The largest US ally in the Middle East, with presumedly the most outside support, used to be the Shah of Iran. Somehow this did not prevent a revolution.

Certainly contributing factors exist to help explain current realities but they can not be allowed to become excuses. Ultimately a people agree or disagree to live with or without freedom.

[J Thomas]

Looking back, it's clear the Shah's internal base of support was much too narrow. Perhaps a part of it was that his conspicuous consumption didn't overawe educated people, and he wanted them educated.

And he didn't help himself with us by engineering OPEC and the oil crisis of 1973 etc. He asked Kissinger if it would be OK and Kissinger said sure, go ahead. Kissinger was thinking about geopolitics and didn't care if the Shah got a little extra money. But it turned out it wasn't OK. Kind of like we told Saddam it would be OK for him to attack kuwait.... I can't point at anything we did to reduce support after that, but he did get deposed and it's plausible we might have.

Then there was his use of torture. Some people say we taught his torturers, though it seems far more plausible that they taught the CIA. Anyway, I think that when a government starts torturing its political opponents it starts losing legitimacy among its people. Not in any mystical sense. It's just that when people get punished for saying what they think, people start getting the idea that there isn't as much support as it looks like. Everybody has to act like they support the government or they'll get punished, so how much real support is there? It all starts looking fake, and any little thing can show people that a lot of it's fake, and they knock it over. Of the governments the US supported in 1973 that used torture, how many of them are still in existence? Israel is the only one I can think of. Did we support Jordan in 1973? I guess kind of. Egypt. Saudi arabia. Kuwait. UAE. Maybe some others.

Probably the biggest thing that helped overthrow the Shah, though, was the USSR. They were supposed to sit on the border of iran and threaten to invade. Send in assassination teams that killed important people. Generally look like a giant threat. And they fell down on the job. They didn't look nearly threatening enough. A good outside enemy will get people supporting almost anybody. Hitler was enough to get the USSR to support Stalin, even. WIthout Hitler and then the Cold War, could the USSR have held together past, say 1944? No way to prove it one way or the other, but I say it's doubtful. When we didn't look like a sufficiently immediate threat the russians had to use china as an external threat to eke out a few more years. And iran didn't have a sufficient external threat under the Shah.

Saddam used iran, and then the USA to stay in power. He could have been a lot worse and still hung in there, we're the best bogeyman ever.

Certainly contributing factors exist to help explain current realities but they can not be allowed to become excuses. Ultimately a people agree or disagree to live with or without freedom.

Yes. Isn't it amazing that americans are willing to give up their freedom for an external enemy that's probably never numbered more than 30,000 people? A group that isn't a government and has no borders, that controls no land. That has to do elaborate gyrations every time they publish a manifesto to keep it from getting tracked to them.

And yet we're agreeing to live without freedom.

No excuse, sir.

[Don Bacon]

I completely agree with Dan Kervick (and Matt Yglesias). He's 100% correct. The USA has created 9/11s for generations in other countries and now the chickens are coming home to roost. The bombees are turning on the bombers. Therefore we shouldn't export either imperialism or democracy. We should mind our own business. This idea that we somehow have to bomb, sanction and manage others based on our warped perception of what's best for them, a sort of white man's burden, is what gets us, and others, in trouble.

If we would give F16s to the Palestinians, as we do for the Israelis, they would use those to kill Zionist oppressors and not have to resort to suicide bombs, their necessary weapon of choice. But, Mr. Hamid, you never mention Israel--the root cause of Middle East problems--so the Palestinian problem is apparently moot in your view.

Doesn't the irony of us exporting democracy occur to you? Where is it that, in your words,
*people have no political outlet with which to express their anger in a peaceful, legitimate manner,
*millions live in humiliation, treated as little more than petty subjects, to be manipulated, controlled and repressed at will
*the greatest indignities come from their own authoritarian governments, and
*people look back at the glory of their past and then look at their present situation, defined by false promise and lost potential. Where they were once the movers of history, they are now at its mercy.
Only in the Middle East? Or also a little closer to home.

Why export a system which includes: minority oppression, political party restrictions, bogus elections, inadequate health systems, corrupt politicians, religious pomposity, wholesale incarceration, rampant capitalism increasing the rich-poor divide, economic and military imperialism and unlawful executives? Look what it's done for Iraq.

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