Prescient, from 2003. Of course, the depressing conclusion is that America needs to install dictators in the third world to ensure stability.
"Many point to the history of modernisation in the west, and to what we know of contemporary Muslim societies, to show that terrorism tends to arise from those rudely uprooted from rapidly changing societies. The biographies of contemporary Islamist terrorists show the majority to be well-educated, semi-westernised young men on the periphery of traditional societies. Force rapid change on such societies with revolutionary ideas like liberal democracy and globe-spanning market economics, and the result will be an accelerated dislocation that will produce more terrorists, not fewer.
Realists favour improving Iraqi political life, even if the result is still short of democracy-and if a good example there spreads, so much the better...
Democratisers, by contrast, believe that the US should promote, even impose, liberal democracy in the middle east, certainly on its adversaries and, some say, even on its authoritarian “friends.” This we must do to eliminate the sources of rage and frustration that give rise to mass-casualty terrorism. (Poverty elimination alone, they argue, is futile, for the sources of poverty lie in the economic logic of autocracy.)
They further believe that there is good precedent for America’s so doing: the post-second world war occupations of Japan and Germany. Based on those examples, they think that the democratisation of Iraq will spread to other Arab countries and to Iran. Many democratisers also believe that democracy promotion has been America’s mission since 1776, one which has grown steadily with US power.
This latter impulse is by no means new. The most significant early American contact with the Arab world came not from the US government but from Christian missionaries. Their intentions were noble and some of their accomplishments, like the American universities in Cairo and Beirut, stand to this day. But they made few converts, and their Muslim targets resented the premise of their zeal: that Islam was a false faith, and that the civilisation to which it gave rise was inferior to that of the Christian west.
Today’s democratisers are replaying the impulses of those 19th-century missionaries; everything, indeed, is more or less the same-except for two things. First, the gospel is now the “social gospel,” a heavily-armed secularised liberal evangelism, America’s manifest destiny globalised. The second difference is that the resentment of insulted Muslims could not reach across the ocean in the 19th century; today it can...
If the administration does proceed with a broad and rapid democratisation, it is likely to produce the worst possible result: failing to produce Arab democracy, yet reaping untold resentment for trying.
There are many problems with the democratisation approach to the war on terrorism, but the most serious of these concerns its very great difficulty. Muslim, and particularly Arab, political cultures are simply not so malleable that within a generation or two we can transform most of them into liberal democracies. There are few genuine democracies in the Muslim world (Turkey’s is the most mature), and none in the Arab world. This is no coincidence. In different degrees, Arab societies lack three prerequisites for democracy: the belief that the source of political authority is intrinsic to society; a concept of majority rule; and the acceptance of all citizens’ equality before the law. Without the first, the idea of pluralism-and the legitimacy of a “loyal opposition”-cannot exist. Without the second, the idea of elections as a means to form a government is incomprehensible. Without the third, a polity can be neither free nor liberal as those terms are understood in the west.
There are only two ways to conceive of political authority: either it is intrinsic-“of the people, by the people, for the people”-or extrinsic (coming from God, or from some accepted imperial source outside the society). The 17th-century concept of the social contract epitomises the former, but Islamic civilisation has never recognised any intrinsic source of political authority. Islam is a radically monadic religion of divine revelation, and Islamic political culture has developed over more than 1,300 years wholly true to that principle. Since divine, extrinsic authority cannot be disputed there is no logic to political pluralism as a permanent or ideal condition. Tolerance for any other set of social and political principles amounts to heresy; tolerance of other private religious beliefs is conceived as virtuous forbearance, not as a recognition that truth might really be in dispute.
A concept of political leadership flows from these predicates. A leader enunciates and spreads God’s law, and since there is only one God and only one law, it follows that there should only be one political structure and one leader of it. Accountability is not democratic in the western procedural sense, but organic in a religious communal will. Even in our more secular times, Arab government is legitimate when it accords with a priori truth, whether Wahhabi Islam in Saudi Arabia or a Jamahiriya socialist mishmash in Libya. Oppositions denying that a priori truth by definition cannot be “loyal.” The typical Arab conceives an ideal single community of belief that contrasts sharply with the western emphasis on competing but mutually adjusting political factions. Western politics has a flavour of controlled conflict, but Arabs tend to regard that conflict as destructive to community-which brings us to majority rule.
If political truth is intrinsic to society and people are fallible, then political life must amount to trial and error attempts at governing. If no one can invoke the authority of unquestioned a priori truth, it follows that the majority should decide which path to follow. Westerners regard this as common sense but, for entirely understandable reasons, most Arabs do not.
For millennia, most middle easterners lived in moderately-sized villages whose organising principle was usually that of the clan or tribe. They also lived in an insecure world of many dangers, putting a huge premium on preventing rifts within tribal society. Governance invariably revolved around a form of consensus-building. Leadership, usually centralised and hereditary, engaged in open-ended negotiation with the dominant males representing the main branches of the clan; problems were discussed, compromises and understandings reached, and in return all swore personal loyalty to the leader. This methodology was absorbed into and sanctified by Islam, wherein a leader comes to his position through a consensus of elders (ijma) and remains in power through the acquiescence of the community (umma).
Now consider in this light the idea that someone who wins 54 per cent of the vote in an election should get 100 per cent of the power, while the person who wins 46 per cent should get none. This strikes those used to consensus decision-making as not only illogical but dangerous-an invitation to civil strife. This is why when Hafez Assad used to win 98.5 per cent of the vote-which we saw as perverse-it did not strike a typical Syrian as very odd. Historically speaking, too, it is worth noting that consensus forms of decision-making have been far more prevalent than democratic ones. Nor do consensus forms of decision-making equate to tyranny or despotism. Traditional Arab and Muslim governance has been patriarchal and authoritarian, but it has been law-based, participatory at some level, and viewed as legitimate by most of the ruled most of the time.
Finally, there is the matter of equality before the law. The idea of the legal equality of all citizens conflicts with nearly all traditional authority. In Islamic civilisation, men are “more equal” than women, the educated more than the illiterate, the noble or Sherifian more than the commoner, the pious more than the reprobate, and the elder more than the youth. Most Arabs find absurd the idea that the vote of a 22-year-old illiterate peasant woman should be equal to that of a 70-year-old qadi. The presumption of natural hierarchy in society is neither parochial nor ridiculous, and it was, after all, true of typical westerners only a historically short time ago...
To push democracy onto the Arabs before they want it and are ready for it is to stoke precisely their fears of failure, and their resentment of the west, that we should wish to minimise. Dealing with the pathologies of the Arab world is one of the great challenges of our time. But there are no quick fixes, and ultimately, the solution must arise from among the Arabs themselves. The west can help; it cannot mandate."
Meanwhile, the optimistic counterpoint seems hopelessly naive especially in retrospect.
