The fate of the Bushites’ “demagogratization” project in the Middle East

I went to a lunch-time discussion at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, titled “Recovering from Arab Spring Fever”. That’s a reference to the fad for “democratizing” the Middle East that swept through the Bush administration in 2004-2005 and that came to an abrupt end in late January 2006.
The presenters were Nathan Brown and Amr Hamzawy, who have an article on the state of democratization in the Arab world in the current issue of a mag called “The National Interest”, and Suzanne Maloney, who has a broadly parallel piece on democratization in Iran in the same issue. (Those links, alas, won’t give you the full texts, for which you have to pay.)
Maloney’s presentation was pretty good. She pointed out that Congress’s funding of the $75 million program to support citizen-based regime-change efforts in Iran had been almost unanimously opposed by Iranian democrats, precisely because it delegitimized their role. She said the State Dept would have a very hard time spending even the first tranche of this funding. Moreover, because of the intensely controversial (among Iranians) nature of the program, the identity of recipients of the funding would remain classified– for their own protection. This could end up tainting all opposition activists; plus, the State Dept– where, incidentally, she used to work until recently– would not have any real internal or external accountability for how the money gets used.
Altogether, a rather counter-productive way to try to “spread” (and even to demonstrate) democratic values at work…
The other presentation was, necessarily, more nuanced. The “Arab world” is, after all, a much more politically and institutionally diverse a place than Iran. Brown and Hamzawy did a generally good job of describing the present, fairly tenuous, status of the pro-democracy movement in many Arab countries. But in their consideration of what had happened to Washington’s “democratization” project of 2004-2005, I think they did less well. They really failed to identify and explain the impact of the 180-degree turn the Bushites made on democratization in Arab countries in late January of 2006– once it became clear to them that the free and fair elections they’d been calling for in the occupied Palestinian territories had generated a robust Hamas plurality in the PLC.
When I was talking with numerous Arab democrats in Egypt, Jordan, and Syria earlier this year, they all pinpointed two particular positions the US government adopted in 2006 as crucial in their sense that Washington had betrayed the spirit of democracy in the Arab world. The first, as mentioned, was the harshly punitive policy the Bushites adopted toward the elected leadership of the PLC after January 2006; and the second was the strong support Washington gave to Israel’s vicious attack in July-August 2006 against the country and people of a Lebanon that was headed by Fuad Siniora– a man who had emerged from the “Beirut Spring” democratization moves of 2005.
The politics of each of those developments was, at one level, distinct: Hamas was seen as an anti-US (or at least, anti-Israel) force, whereas Siniora was viewed in Washington as very much “on the US side”. But for Arab democrats, the fact that the US in one case openly participated in, and in the other strongly encouraged, harsh actions taken against Arab leaderships who had emerged precisely through the Bushite pro-democratization campaign of 2004-2005 led to, as I have said, a strong sense of betrayal.
It strikes me that to promote democratic values and democratic practice one should also practice these values oneself?
Indeed, it is hard to see how anyone in the Arab world– or, come to that, Iran– can take seriously Washington’s avowals of support for “democratization” if Washington itself is not prepared to deal with differences of policy and opinion using the existing institutions for dialogue and nonviolent conflict resolution but chooses, instead, to do so through force and threats of force.
From this perspective, perhaps we ought to rename the Bushites’ campaign. It was not, after all, a true campaign for democratization but rather, an attempt to demagogue the issue for narrowly defined strategic purposes in the Middle East: demagogratization, not democratization.