The parliamentary elections in Palestine have provoked a debate over the Bush administration strategy to deal with the long term problem of terrorism by promoting democratization in the Middle East. Here are two very different perspectives. Max Boot is a prominent intellectual of the 2nd wave of neoconservativism, the group whose ideas are ascendant in Washington today. Here is my interview with Boot. http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people3/Boot/boot-con0.html The second article takes a very different perspective and was written by Anatol Lieven, a columnist for the Financial Times and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. Here is my interview with Lieven: http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people4/Lieven/lieven-con0.html
From the Los Angeles Times
MAX BOOT
The weakness in backing strongmen
Hamas' victory shows the folly of relying on tyrants to repress Islamic extremists.
Max Boot
February 1, 2006
HAMAS' VICTORY in the Palestinian elections last week is widely seen as discrediting President Bush's desire to spread democracy. Actually, the electoral triumph of this pro-terrorist, anti-Western movement offers more evidence for the failure of the cynical approach that the United States pursued before Bush came into office — a pseudo-realistic policy of using supposedly benign dictators to repress Islamic extremists.
That, after all, was the rationale behind the Oslo process: Israel and the U.S. would support Yasser Arafat in the hope that he would deliver peace and crack down on the crazies. Fat chance. Instead, his Fatah party gave birth to the suicide bombers of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and he tolerated terrorists affiliated with competing groups, as a cudgel to pressure Israel into greater concessions. Palestinian television and radio stations, newspapers and schools never ceased to glorify suicide bombers (
shahids, or martyrs) and to revile Jews and Americans. When Israel wasn't willing to deliver as much land as Arafat wanted, he unleashed the second intifada, an all-out terrorist offensive that took years to defeat.
In that time, conditions only got worse in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, leading to a precipitous fall in Palestinian living standards and considerable property damage and loss of life, without defeating the "Zionist entity." This failure increased disenchantment with the Palestinian Authority, which has all the disadvantages of a typical oligarchy (including extreme corruption) and none of the advantages (it provides no law and order). Disenchantment turned to disgust when Gaza descended into anarchy following the Israeli pullout. It was thus no great surprise that voters turned to Hamas, which has shown itself to be less venal and more adept at delivering social services than the incumbent Fatah party.
Polls indicate that most Palestinian voters aren't in favor of waging all-out war against Israel, which would result in ruinous retaliation. But there is no denying that this has been Hamas' agenda, notwithstanding occasional truces. It now has a choice — either suspend its war on Israel and concentrate on delivering mundane civil services, or risk a backlash among voters.
The Hamas militants, unlike their fellow fundamentalists in Iran, don't have the luxury of oil revenues. Much of the Palestinian Authority's budget comes from European, American and Israeli largesse, which presumably will be cut off unless Hamas comes out against violence and in favor of Israel's right to exist. If Hamas sticks to a rigid ideological agenda, it will become as unpopular as the Taliban. And if Hamastan becomes a breeding ground of international terrorism, it will be even more vulnerable to a military response than Afghanistan was.
Palestine, like Iran, may have to pass through a period of Islamist misrule before it arrives at something better, as Iraq and Afghanistan seem to be doing under relatively moderate religious parties. That's unfortunate, but what's the alternative? There aren't many well-intentioned strongmen who will overhaul Islamic societies along Western lines and pave the way for democracy, as Kemal Ataturk did in post-Ottoman Turkey.
Most of the dictators we wind up supporting or tolerating — not only Arafat but also Hosni Mubarak, Bashar Assad, Pervez Musharraf, the Saudi royals and, once upon a time, Saddam Hussein — have a symbiotic relationship with Islamic extremists. The radicals serve the dictators' purpose: They scare the West into endorsing an illiberal status quo. Mubarak, for one, extends more tolerance to the Muslim Brotherhood than to liberal critics such as Ayman Nour, now languishing in jail. When the mosque becomes the only outlet for dissent, the odds of an Islamic takeover increase once the tyrant leaves the scene.
Bush is right not to play the dictators' game anymore. The best way to avoid the Hobson's choice between different types of tyranny — secular or religious — is to pressure existing regimes to allow more dissent and eventually democracy. That never happened under Arafat, when all the major media outlets were controlled by the state and the judiciary was the handmaiden of the government. Anyone who publicly criticized Arafat's graft and incompetence risked a beating, or worse. Countless Palestinians were killed after being convicted in kangaroo courts of being Israeli "collaborators."
For years, the United States and Israel turned a blind eye to such abuses. And now we see the result: a brutalized society in which the most radical elements have taken over. We should work to avoid that outcome in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Pakistan and other Muslim states by getting serious about human rights now — before it's too late.
Max Boot is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations
From the International Herald Tribune
The gap between U.S. rhetoric and reality
By Anatol Lieven
MONDAY, JANUARY 30, 2006
Washington The victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections ought to lead to a fundamental rethinking of U.S. strategy in the Middle East, especially since it follows electoral successes for Islamist parties in Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
The most important lesson of the elections is that the United States cannot afford to use the rhetoric of spreading democracy as an excuse for avoiding dealing with pressing national grievances and wishes. If the United States pursues or supports policies that are detested by a majority of ordinary people, then these people will react accordingly if they are given a chance to vote.
Above all, U.S. policy makers must understand that other peoples have their own national pride and national interests, which they expect their governments and representatives to defend. In Russia in the 1990s, the liberals helped to destroy their electoral chances by giving Russian voters the impression that they put deference to American wishes above the interests of Russia.
Today, Americans who want to support liberal revolution in Iran as a way of making Iran more responsive to U.S. and Israeli demands are making the same mistake. And in order to understand this, it is hardly necessary to study Russia or Iran. In the United States, if a political party were supported by a foreign country, and gave the impression of serving that country's interests, would it stand any chance of being elected to anything?
But in truth, the present centrality of the "democratization" idea to administration rhetoric does not come from any study of the Middle East, or of reality in general. Rather, the Bush administration has fallen back on this rhetoric in part because all other paths and justifications have failed or been rejected. The administration desperately needed some big vision that would give the American people the impression of a plan for the war on terror, promising something beyond tighter domestic security and endless military operations.
Thus spreading democracy was always one of the arguments used for the Iraq war, but it only became the central one after the failure to find the promised weapons of mass destruction. As a result of the Iraqi quagmire, the language of preventive war and military intervention, so prevalent in the administration's National Security Strategy of 2002, has also become obviously empty, requiring a new central theme for the forthcoming security strategy of 2006.
The road map toward a final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been shelved, and Bush has admitted that his promise to create an independent Palestinian state by the end of his second term has been abandoned. Building Palestinian democracy therefore became in effect a diversion from a failure or refusal to make progress on addressing real Palestinian grievances.
Finally, demands for democratic regime change in Iran have been used as a way of avoiding making the very painful U.S. concessions that will be necessary if Iran's nuclear program is to be stopped by diplomatic means. These will have to involve U.S. security guarantees to Iran, a leading place for Iran in any Middle Eastern security order, a role for Iran in shaping the future of both Afghanistan and Iraq, diplomatic recognition and open trade and investment. Any Iranian government would have to demand all this in return for giving up the future possibility of a nuclear deterrent.
Given the mixture of extremism and chaos in the new Iranian government, such a deal may now be impossible as long as the popularly elected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remains in office. But as Flynt Leverett, a former director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council, has revealed, in 2003 the administration received a credible Iranian offer of comprehensive negotiations, which it brusquely rejected.
Democratic Party leaders, too, have failed utterly to support a diplomatic alternative to the failed strategy of the Bush administration, partly because they are too scared to confront the bitter anger among powerful groups in the United States that would attend any radical change of U.S. policy toward Iran.
The administration has also been able to neutralize domestic opposition to its "strategy" because its rhetoric appeals to a deep American belief in the U.S. duty to spread democracy and freedom. This is indeed in itself a noble aspiration, and has been until recently the source of much of U.S. moral authority in the world.
But the Bush administration's combination of preaching human rights with torture, of preaching democracy to Muslims with contempt for the views of those same Muslims, has not helped either the spread of democracy or U.S. interests but badly damaged both.
In fact, the distance between Bush administration rhetoric and observable reality in some areas is beginning to look almost reminiscent of Soviet Communism. And as in the Soviet Union, this gap is also becoming more and more apparent to the rest of the world.
(Anatol Lieven
, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, Washington, is the author of ''America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism.'')
