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Arabs on the Verge of Democracy

August 9, 2004 By DANIELLE PLETKA

Washington - Early last month, John Kerry devoted 11 days to fleshing out his foreign policy priorities. Promoting democracy in the Middle East, he made clear, will not be high on his agenda. Sadly, Mr. Kerry's decision could nothave come at a worse moment. For the first time in half a century, democracy is the talk of the Arab world.

Mr. Kerry has not been specific about many of his goals, but one thing he's gone out of his way to advertise is his distaste for pushing reform at the expense of "stability" in the Middle East. Sure, he's in favor of democracy in principle, but not as the centerpiece of his foreign policy agenda. "Realism," in the fashion of Metternich and
Kissinger, is his guiding light, Mr. Kerry told The New Yorker.

In this respect, Mr. Kerry echoes President George H. W. Bush and even his own father, Richard Kerry, a diplomat who once criticized the Reagan administration's "fatal error of seeing U.S. security as dependent on illusions of propagating democracy" in the Soviet bloc.

Such "realism," of course, was anything but. It failed to appreciate the real forces and opportunities at work in the world. The same is true today. The initial reviews of the current President Bush's push for reform in the Middle East may have been harsh, especially from the region's entrenched powers. Yet in the last few months, the debate,
once confined to émigré papers published in London or Paris, has suddenly bubbled up onto the pages of the state-controlled press in the Arab world.

And what about the argument that democracy can't be
"imposed" from the outside? That counsel of despair was knocked out of the park by the Palestinian scholar Daoud Kuttab, who wrote in the London-based Arabic daily Al Hayat that "Arab democrats have failed to reach their goals through their own efforts" and should welcome support from
outside "irrespective of the messenger." Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel laureate, went even further in Al Ahram, Egypt's main daily newspaper, warning that postponing reform would be "playing with fire."

Mr. Kerry and his surrogates, meanwhile, worry about change
that comes "too quickly" and breeds "violence and
repression," in the words of an old Kerry hand from the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jonathan Winer.

Arab democrats and their supporters abroad, however, might
respond that the Arab world is hardly short of violence and
repression as things now stand, and change that comes too
slowly might prove the biggest danger. Indeed, the fruits
of "stability" are hard to find in the latest Arab Human
Development Report issued by the United Nations Development
Program. It describes the Arab Middle East and North Africa
as the least politically free region of the world. It also
describes a region where 65 million adults are illiterate,
almost two-thirds of them women, and where one in five
citizens lives on less than $2 a day.

At the same time, Arabs are increasingly exposed to the
world through the electronic media, and likely to become
more angry and frustrated about their degraded status in a
globalizing world economy. You don't have to strain to see
such forces at play in the blind rage of Islamic radicals,
or to suspect that continued "stability" of the sort that
has held the region's politics and economies in stagnation
for the last 40 years will only make matters worse.

In theory, the Broader Middle East and North Africa
Initiative rolled out by President Bush at the Group of 8
summit meeting in June is aimed at addressing the roots of
terrorism in the Middle East. In fact, the initiative has
amounted to little more than a tepid cheer for Arab
democracy, and the Bush administration has been less
aggressive in following through on its modest proposals
than many hoped. If American support for democracy is going
to amount to anything, there's a lot more work to be done,
especially among the skeptics inside the United States
Foreign Service. And if Mr. Bush can't rally his own troops
to the cause, he's unlikely to continue making headway
overseas.

But make no mistake, he has made headway. Notwithstanding
the administration's modest approach, democracy is now at
the center of debate in Arab capitals. And while some in
the United States continue to insist that Arab democracy is
the fantasy of a discredited cabal in Washington, an effort
to avoid what they assert should be America's only priority
- resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - Arab
intellectuals don't necessarily agree. The director of
Egypt's Al Ahram center for Political and Strategic
Studies, Abdel Monem Said, took the issue on himself.
"Making reform and human rights contingent upon resolving
the Palestinian problem," he said, "confirms what the
American neo-cons are saying, that the political regimes
harming human rights are using the Palestinian problem in
order to divert glances from their own behavior."

It's not 1989 in the Middle East, and a series of velvet
revolutions aren't on tap for the immediate future. But the
intellectual firepower that underlies any such revolution
is growing; the region is in the throes of genuine
pro-democratic ferment. And governments have taken note,
admittedly in their own half-hearted fashion. The Arab
League has embraced a series of self-serving reforms; the
Saudis have announced plans for municipal elections
starting in November; and the Bahrainis and Qataris are
making real changes to their political systems.

Ferment is not change, but Mr. Kerry and his advisers may
be kidding themselves that an incipient upheaval can be
turned off just by Washington whistling another tune. More
likely, without change, the United States will face one
collapsing dictatorship after another and an instability
much greater and more threatening than any that would come
from an aggressive American push for democracy. Mr. Kerry
would be wiser to try to see the world as it is - and
realize that hoping the United States can impose an
unchanging "stability" on the Arab world may be the
greatest unrealism of all.

Danielle Pletka is vice president of foreign and defense
policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/09/opinion/09pletka.html?ex=1093058983&ei=1&en=692d1d7e748917ac

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