Shadi Hamid and Steven Brooke: Promoting Democracy to Stop Terror, Revisted
[Shadi Hamid is deputy director of the Brookings Doha Center and a fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. Steven Brooke is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Government at the University of Texas. He was formerly a research associate at the Nixon Center.]
U.S. democracy promotion in the Middle East has suffered a series of crippling defeats. Despite occasionally paying lip service to the idea, few politicians on either the left or right appear committed to supporting democratic reform as a central component of American policy in the region. Who can really blame them, given that democracy promotion has become toxic to a public with little patience left for various “missions” abroad? But as the Obama administration struggles to renew ties with the Muslim world, particularly in light of the June 2009 Cairo speech, it should resist the urge to abandon its predecessor’s focus on promoting democracy in what remains the most undemocratic region in the world.
Promoting democratic reform, this time not just with rhetoric but with action, should be given higher priority in the current administration, even though early indications suggest the opposite may be happening. Despite all its bad press, democracy promotion remains, in the long run, the most effective way to undermine terrorism and political violence in the Middle East. This is not a very popular argument. Indeed, a key feature of the post-Bush debate over democratization is an insistence on separating support for democracy from any explicit national security rationale. This, however, would be a mistake with troubling consequences for American foreign policy.
A post-Bush reassessment
The twilight of the Bush presidency and the start of Obama’s ushered in an expansive discussion over the place of human rights and democracy in American foreign policy. An emerging consensus suggests that the U.S. approach must be fundamentally reassessed and “repositioned.” This means, in part, a scaling down of scope and ambition and of avoiding the sweeping Wilsonian tones of recent years. That certainly sounds good. Anything, after all, would be better than the Bush administration’s disconcerting mix of revolutionary pro-democracy rhetoric with time-honored realist policies of privileging “stable” pro-American dictators. This only managed to wring the worst out of both approaches.
For its part, the Obama administration has made a strategic decision to shift the focus to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which it sees, correctly, as a major source of Arab grievance. This, in turn, has led the administration to strengthen ties with autocratic regimes, such as Egypt and Jordan, which it sees as critical to the peace process.
Some might see such developments as a welcome re-prioritization. However, by downgrading support of Middle East democracy to one among many policy priorities, we risk returning to a pre-9/11 status quo, where the promotion of democracy would neither be worn on our sleeve nor trump short-term hard interests. The “transformative” nature of any democracy promotion project would be replaced by a more sober, targeted focus on providing technical assistance to legislative and judicial branches and strengthening civil society organizations in the region. In many ways, this would be a welcome change from the ideological overload of the post-9/11 environment. But in other ways, it would not.
Those who wish to avoid a piecemeal approach to reform and revive U.S. efforts to support democracy often come back to invocations of American exceptionalism and the argument that the United States, as the world’s most powerful nation, has a responsibility to advance the very ideals which animated its founding. These arguments are attractive and admirable, but how durable can they be when translated into concrete policy initiatives? In the wake of a war ostensibly waged in the name of democracy, can a strategy resting on gauzy moral imperatives garner bipartisan support and therefore long-term policy stability? In an ideal world, there would not be a need to justify or rationalize supporting democracy abroad; the moral imperative would be enough. But in the world of politics and decision-making, it rarely is.
Democracy and terrorism after
After the attacks of September 11th, a basic, intuitive proposition surfaced — that without basic democratic freedoms, citizens lack peaceful, constructive means to express their grievances and are thus more likely to resort to violence. Accordingly, 9/11 did not happen because the terrorists hated our freedom, but, rather, because the Middle East’s stifling political environment had bred frustration, anger, and, ultimately, violence. Many in the region saw us as complicit, in large part because we were actively supporting — to the tune of billions of dollars in economic and military aid — the region’s most repressive regimes. The realization that our longstanding support of dictatorships had backfired, producing a Middle East rife with instability and political violence, was a sobering one, and grounded the policy debate in a way that has since been lost. The unfolding debate was interesting to watch, if only because it contradicted the popular perception that Republicans were uninterested in the “root causes” of terrorism. In fact, they were. And their somewhat novel ideas on how to address them would begin to figure prominently in the rhetoric and policies of the Bush administration.
In a landmark speech at the National Endowment for Democracy in November 2003, President Bush argued that “as long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export.” This theme would become the centerpiece of his inaugural and State of the Union addresses in early 2005. In the latter, the president declared that “the best antidote to radicalism and terror is the tolerance and hope kindled in free societies.” In the summer of 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a Cairo audience that “things have changed. We had a very rude awakening on September 11th, when I think we realized that our policies to try and promote what we thought was stability in the Middle East had actually allowed, underneath, a very malignant, meaning cancerous, form of extremism to grow up underneath because people didn’t have outlets for their political views.” The aggressive rhetoric was initially supported by the creation of aid programs with strong democracy components such as the Middle East Partnership Initiative (mepi).
But with a deteriorating Iraq, an expansionist Iran, and the electoral success of Islamist parties throughout the region, American enthusiasm for promoting democracy began to wane. One Egyptian human rights activist despondently told us in the summer of 2006 that Washington’s rhetoric “convinced thousands that the U.S. was serious about democracy and reform. We also believed this, but we were being deceived.” Perhaps the most disheartening sign of how far the democratic wave receded in the Middle East came during the 2007 State of the Union address. President Bush singled out “places like Cuba, Belarus, and Burma,” for democracy promotion, all safely away from his chaotic, failing experiment in the Arab World.
It is safe to say that the Bush administration’s project to promote Middle East democracy failed...
Read entire article at Policy Review
U.S. democracy promotion in the Middle East has suffered a series of crippling defeats. Despite occasionally paying lip service to the idea, few politicians on either the left or right appear committed to supporting democratic reform as a central component of American policy in the region. Who can really blame them, given that democracy promotion has become toxic to a public with little patience left for various “missions” abroad? But as the Obama administration struggles to renew ties with the Muslim world, particularly in light of the June 2009 Cairo speech, it should resist the urge to abandon its predecessor’s focus on promoting democracy in what remains the most undemocratic region in the world.
Promoting democratic reform, this time not just with rhetoric but with action, should be given higher priority in the current administration, even though early indications suggest the opposite may be happening. Despite all its bad press, democracy promotion remains, in the long run, the most effective way to undermine terrorism and political violence in the Middle East. This is not a very popular argument. Indeed, a key feature of the post-Bush debate over democratization is an insistence on separating support for democracy from any explicit national security rationale. This, however, would be a mistake with troubling consequences for American foreign policy.
A post-Bush reassessment
The twilight of the Bush presidency and the start of Obama’s ushered in an expansive discussion over the place of human rights and democracy in American foreign policy. An emerging consensus suggests that the U.S. approach must be fundamentally reassessed and “repositioned.” This means, in part, a scaling down of scope and ambition and of avoiding the sweeping Wilsonian tones of recent years. That certainly sounds good. Anything, after all, would be better than the Bush administration’s disconcerting mix of revolutionary pro-democracy rhetoric with time-honored realist policies of privileging “stable” pro-American dictators. This only managed to wring the worst out of both approaches.
For its part, the Obama administration has made a strategic decision to shift the focus to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which it sees, correctly, as a major source of Arab grievance. This, in turn, has led the administration to strengthen ties with autocratic regimes, such as Egypt and Jordan, which it sees as critical to the peace process.
Some might see such developments as a welcome re-prioritization. However, by downgrading support of Middle East democracy to one among many policy priorities, we risk returning to a pre-9/11 status quo, where the promotion of democracy would neither be worn on our sleeve nor trump short-term hard interests. The “transformative” nature of any democracy promotion project would be replaced by a more sober, targeted focus on providing technical assistance to legislative and judicial branches and strengthening civil society organizations in the region. In many ways, this would be a welcome change from the ideological overload of the post-9/11 environment. But in other ways, it would not.
Those who wish to avoid a piecemeal approach to reform and revive U.S. efforts to support democracy often come back to invocations of American exceptionalism and the argument that the United States, as the world’s most powerful nation, has a responsibility to advance the very ideals which animated its founding. These arguments are attractive and admirable, but how durable can they be when translated into concrete policy initiatives? In the wake of a war ostensibly waged in the name of democracy, can a strategy resting on gauzy moral imperatives garner bipartisan support and therefore long-term policy stability? In an ideal world, there would not be a need to justify or rationalize supporting democracy abroad; the moral imperative would be enough. But in the world of politics and decision-making, it rarely is.
Democracy and terrorism after
After the attacks of September 11th, a basic, intuitive proposition surfaced — that without basic democratic freedoms, citizens lack peaceful, constructive means to express their grievances and are thus more likely to resort to violence. Accordingly, 9/11 did not happen because the terrorists hated our freedom, but, rather, because the Middle East’s stifling political environment had bred frustration, anger, and, ultimately, violence. Many in the region saw us as complicit, in large part because we were actively supporting — to the tune of billions of dollars in economic and military aid — the region’s most repressive regimes. The realization that our longstanding support of dictatorships had backfired, producing a Middle East rife with instability and political violence, was a sobering one, and grounded the policy debate in a way that has since been lost. The unfolding debate was interesting to watch, if only because it contradicted the popular perception that Republicans were uninterested in the “root causes” of terrorism. In fact, they were. And their somewhat novel ideas on how to address them would begin to figure prominently in the rhetoric and policies of the Bush administration.
In a landmark speech at the National Endowment for Democracy in November 2003, President Bush argued that “as long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export.” This theme would become the centerpiece of his inaugural and State of the Union addresses in early 2005. In the latter, the president declared that “the best antidote to radicalism and terror is the tolerance and hope kindled in free societies.” In the summer of 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a Cairo audience that “things have changed. We had a very rude awakening on September 11th, when I think we realized that our policies to try and promote what we thought was stability in the Middle East had actually allowed, underneath, a very malignant, meaning cancerous, form of extremism to grow up underneath because people didn’t have outlets for their political views.” The aggressive rhetoric was initially supported by the creation of aid programs with strong democracy components such as the Middle East Partnership Initiative (mepi).
But with a deteriorating Iraq, an expansionist Iran, and the electoral success of Islamist parties throughout the region, American enthusiasm for promoting democracy began to wane. One Egyptian human rights activist despondently told us in the summer of 2006 that Washington’s rhetoric “convinced thousands that the U.S. was serious about democracy and reform. We also believed this, but we were being deceived.” Perhaps the most disheartening sign of how far the democratic wave receded in the Middle East came during the 2007 State of the Union address. President Bush singled out “places like Cuba, Belarus, and Burma,” for democracy promotion, all safely away from his chaotic, failing experiment in the Arab World.
It is safe to say that the Bush administration’s project to promote Middle East democracy failed...