Evaluating the Bush menu for change in the Middle East.

Cantori, Louis J. ; Norton, Augustus Richard

These contributions were presented at a roundtable of the Conference Group on the Middle East, "Evaluating the Bush Menu for Change in the Middle East," at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, September 5, 2004.

The United States in the Middle East: Grand Plans, Grand Ayatollahs and Dark Alleys

Augustus Richard Norton, Boston University

 Matt Lauer: Can America win the War against Terrorism?
 President George W. Bush: I don't think you can win it. But I think
 you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are
 less acceptable in parts of the world.

 --The Today Show, NBC, August 30, 2004

In a moment of unguarded candor, the president of the United States conceded that definitive victory in the declared war against terrorism is not possible. Within hours, White House spokespeople insisted that Bush had "misspoken" and that the United States can "win" this war. The next day, addressing an American Legion audience in Nashville, Bush insisted that "we are winning and we will win." For the sake of argument, however, let's apply the lower standard for success implied by the president when he "misspoke." In other words, has the United States created conditions that render terrorism a "less acceptable" tactic?

Al-Qaeda, now found in 60 countries according to U.S. government reports, remains a persistent and deadly menace. It has been able to adapt and even thrive despite the killing or capturing of much of the September 2001 cadre. In an October 2003 memorandum not intended for the public, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld noted that the United States was "having mixed results" with al-Qaeda as "a great many remain at large." (1) Moreover, rather than disappearing, al-Qaeda has morphed into a variety of regional groups. This is underlined in a May 2004 report by the respected International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, which notes that al-Qaeda, as an ideological phenomenon and decentralized collection of local contractors, is alive and well.

Since the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001, but especially since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the political mood in much of the Middle East and the larger Muslim world reflects deep mistrust of U.S. intentions and anger over U.S. actions in Iraq. The present, often poisonous mood was anticipated at a well-attended February 2003 antiwar conference organized by faculty and students of Cairo University a few weeks prior to the invasion of Iraq, where a representative poster said: saqut al-Iraq, saqut Amerika (If Iraq is knocked down, America is knocked down). The sentiment expressed in the poster hints at the potent appeal of recruitment to confront (peacefully or otherwise) American power. The path that the United States has taken in Iraq, as well as the Bush administration's retreat from any pretense of balance in the Israel-Palestine conflict, evokes disdain even among many heretofore pro-western intellectuals.

A century-and-a-half ago, Florence Nightingale, the English nurse whose experience in the Crimean War led her to become a leading hospital reformer, offered wry advice: "It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a hospital that it should do the sick no harm." The United States seems to have violated Nightingale's dictum in Iraq by several measures; while the Iraqi people suffered terribly under Saddam Hussein's vengeful rule, it is by no means clear that the average Iraqi is better off in the present chaos than under the dictator's rule. Not only have as many as 100,000 or more Iraqis been killed by the occupation forces; (2) by failing to quell the widespread insurgency and reduce the rampant insecurity, the United States has illustrated the limits of its power. Far from curing "sickness," the United States has instead fostered conditions in which "disease" spreads. The Bush administration anticipated reaping a harvest of gratitude for toppling Saddam Hussein; instead, it confronts widespread contempt for its inability to provide order and for the inevitable brutality of its occupation.

Powerful visual images of the American occupation now reside in the collective political consciousness of the Muslim world. Much as the pictures of the terrified Muhammad Rami Jamal al-Dura, the doomed boy caught in an intifada crossfire in September 2000, quickly spread across the Arab world, so the photos from Abu Ghraib prison instantly became icons recognizable around the globe. These haunting images against the canvas of the continuing occupation of Iraq stoke anger in the Muslim world. No matter how noble one might believe American intentions in Iraq to be, the pictures promote anti-American violence and terrorism.

U.S. war architects were hopelessly naive, not only in their expectations about the ease of shepherding Iraq's transformation, but even in terms of the challenge of maintaining security, as indicated by the rampant looting and disorder that marked the capture of Baghdad. One indication of the best-case assumptions that informed the Bush administration's approach to Iraq is that a month after the invasion, in mid-April 2003, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld actually began to withdraw major army units from the country. (3)

Kenneth Pollock, a former NSC staffer, argued in a co-authored article in Foreign Affairs in 1999 against a "rollback" campaign to topple Saddam Hussein (4) and in favor of the continued containment of Iraq, but he reversed himself in the run-up to the war. (5) Did Pollock, who in 1999 clearly understood the shortcomings and weakness of the mostly expatriate anti-Saddam opposition, succumb to the war fever that gripped Washington in 2002 and 2003. In a 2004 interview, Pollock offered: "I made a mistake based on faulty intelligence. Of course, I feel guilty about it. I feel awfu." (6) One wonders though whether Pollock's jump onto the war wagon might have had less to do with faulty intelligence than simply a wish not to be left behind. If so, he and Senator John Kerry (D-MA) probably have a lot in common. Critical faculties were in short supply in America's jingoistic rush to war, as the pathetic performance of U.S. media, especially cable television news channels, demonstrated only too well.

Prior to the invasion, neither the architects of the war nor skeptics and critics, for that matter, could claim more than the most superficial "feel" for the dynamics of Iraqi politics. (7) Nonetheless, a coterie of scholars, former and present officials, wonks and pundits provided intellectual legitimacy to the war architects' arguments that invading Iraq would be a "cakewalk," to recall the prediction of Kenneth Adelman, former head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. (8) Adelman, like many other invasion advocates, anticipated a warm welcome from Iraqis:

 A U.S. attack on Iraq and Saddam Hussein will already garner solid
 support in key quarters. The Iraqi people will be cheering from the
 rooftops, as they did at the opening of the Gulf War in 1991, and
 dancing in the streets of Baghdad, as the liberated public in
 Kabul did months ago. (9)

In his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on August 26, 2002, Vice President Cheney cited "Middle East expert, Professor Fouad Ajami, [who] predicts that after liberation the streets in Basra and Baghdad are sure to erupt in joy...." Subsequently, Ajami offered an offhand mea culpa in the form of a letter jettisoning his transformationalist assumptions and embracing Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" thesis:

 A decade ago, Huntington was prescient when he wrote of the coming
 clash of civilizations. I, along with many others, dissented and
 wrote a critique of his idea. I had fallen back on the universalism
 of modern civilization. But history acquiesced with his brooding,
 darker view as the 1990s drew to a close and as the death pilots of
 September 11, 2001, blew our way. I have since conceded Huntington's
 wisdom and the feebleness of my own hopes. (10)

In his paean, Ajami concedes that Huntington was right all along. He never pauses to ponder that the Iraq invasion made the clash thesis a self-fulfilling paradigm rather than an example of prescient political analysis.

While the disorder and violence in Iraq confounded optimistic prognostication, some war promoters sought to deflect criticism onto the government by arguing that U.S. missteps and half-steps were the problem rather than the strategic design itself, as in the gloss of William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard. Kristol, it may be recalled, posited that the Iraq war was a step toward the ultimate goal of toppling the regime in Iran by whatever means might be necessary. (11)

Former CIA analyst Reuel Marc Gerecht, whose pungent Weekly Standard articles were widely circulated inside the beltway in the rush to war, argued six months before the invasion that the United States would lose "enormous face in the region" if it did not go to war, and that in the absence of "awe at American power," the United States would be vulnerable to terror attacks. Thus, the coming war would, he argued, strengthen the war against terrorism. (12) Gerecht was also a strident voice for the democratic transformation of Iraq, for the empowerment of the Shii Muslims under the leadership of Ahmed Chalabi and for the destruction of the officer corps of the Iraqi army. (13) Gerecht anticipated that the Sunni community would have no alternative but to embrace democracy in a federal Iraq. In reality, the Sunni community has become the heart of the insurgency.

As fantasies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were unmasked, the Bush administration increasingly stressed the democratic transformation of Iraq, and scholars jumped on the democratization bandwagon. For instance, Larry Diamond, the Hoover Institution democracy guru who advised U.S. Proconsul Paul Bremer, offered a halcyon depiction of Iraq as a beacon of democratic transformation: "Iraq is now better positioned than any of its Arab neighbors to become a democracy in the next few years. That achievement, however tentative and imperfect, would ignite mounting aspirations for democratization from Iran to Morocco." (14)

Alongside the now discredited goal of ending Iraq's development of weapons of mass destruction, the toppling of Saddam Hussein was central to a grand geopolitical plan to remake the Middle East by offering Iraq as an exemplar of democratic transformation. The point was to provide an intimidating object lesson to regional autocrats by demonstrating that America is an irresistible hegemon. The transformationist model is particularly associated with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz: "I don't think it's unreasonable to think that Iraq, properly managed--and it's going to take a lot of attention, and the stakes are enormous, much higher than Afghanistan--that it really could turn out to be, I hesitate to say it, the first Arab democracy, or at least the first one except for Lebanon's brief history," he says. "And even if it makes it only Romanian style, that's still such an advance over anywhere else in the Arab world." (15)

There is no question that the Iraqis deserve to live in peace and freedom, but in a country in which civil society was thwarted for decades, political parties have to be built from the ground up; democratic traditions remain to be invented. This is not to say that democracy is unimportant in the Middle East or that it is not a major topic for debate. For more than a decade, there has been a lively democracy debate, not least among Islamists. Larbi Sadiki has comprehensively summarized the terms of the debate in a book that is brilliant in its execution. (16) This makes it all the more regrettable that any democracy project that the United State touches is, for the time being at least, dead on arrival.

At present, however, sectarianism, not democracy, is the most potent element of political solidarity in Iraq. To take a case in point, when the U.S. occupation authority was creating the Governing Council, the majority Shii Muslims were not concerned at all about the ideology of members so long as they were nominally Shiis (private communication from the diplomat who played the leading U.S. role in assembling the council). (17) By the same token, the Shii community's commitment to democracy is based on its control of the political system. This may only harden the sectarian identities of Sunni and Kurdish Iraqis, among others.

In Washington, it was imagined that a transformed, democratized Iraq would reverberate throughout the Arab world's authoritarian regimes. Now Iraq means something quite different. For ruling elites in Arab capitals, Iraq has become a new cautionary tale, replacing Algeria, to illustrate the merits of stability and an iron grip on power. And, would there be much complaint in Washington if, in Baghdad, a strongman quelled the violence and made nice toward America? On the contrary, the man on horseback would be welcomed, even though this would likely put paid--in all but empty rhetoric--to democracy and lend even more credence to a cynical assessment of U.S. aims.

In established democracies, elections are often viewed as moments for a fresh political start. Unfortunately, in the fractious and violent conditions of present-day Iraq, it remains to be seen whether the January 2005 election will only harden the existing divisions and promote further enmity toward America or catalyze a creative moment of reformation and freedom. Notwithstanding even an impressive turnout, Washington's preferred secular allies are incapable of ending the insurgency's momentum. (18) Leading Islamist figures, especially Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, continue to gain political salience and support, suggesting that the contours of politics in Iraq will bear little resemblance to the imaginings of President Bush and his associates, who obviously found the prominence of Sistani an unfortunate surprise. It is instructive that the constitutional framework crafted by the CPA on Proconsul Bremer's watch was quickly discarded by acting Prime Minister Iyad Allawi as the occupation officially ended on June 28, 2004. (19) The dream of Iraq as a liberal democracy, however soothing, is infeasible at present. The most realistic course for the Bush administration is a hybrid government that at best bears more resemblance to the aspirations of Muhammad Khatami than Paul Wolfowitz.

Even in the surreal atmosphere of Washington in the early twenty-first century, it is mind-boggling that leading U.S. officials imagine that democracies might be installed in Middle Eastern countries while Islamist movements are sidelined. In one telling speech, Richard Haass, former head of the State Department's Policy Planning bureau (now president of the Council on Foreign Relations) averred that parties of an "Islamic character" would be allowed to participate, but that this illustrated why we would have to move slowly. His clear, if tacit, assumption was that secular, liberal parties could be fashioned; it was only a matter of time. This illustrates a rather profound misreading of the political landscape in the contemporary Middle East and exaggerates of the prospect for secular opposition parties that might act as handmaidens of U.S. power.

Meantime, the Bush administration clings to the illusion that it can engineer a satisfactory outcome in Baghdad that will preserve the design of its grand plan. Robert Kagan, no stranger in neocon circles and an ardent proponent of invading Iraq, assessed the administration's dearth of answers in blunt terms: "All but the most blindly devoted Bush supporters can see that Bush administration officials have no clue about what to do in Iraq tomorrow, much less a month from now." (20)

Concern that the Bush approach to Iraq only led down a dark, and deadly alley prompted a collection of 27 distinguished diplomats, flag officers and other senior officials to issue an extraordinary public statement in June 2004 expressing deep concern about the need for a fundamental change in U.S. policy. Among other facts cited, the self-styled Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change noted: "Muslim youth are turning to anti-American terrorism. Never in the two-and-a-quarter centuries of our history has the United States been so isolated among the nations, so broadly feared and distrusted. No loyal American would question our ultimate right to act alone in our national interest; but responsible leadership would not turn to unilateral military action before diplomacy had been thoroughly explored." (21)

To return to the question addressed at the beginning of this essay, by invading and occupying Iraq has the United States created conditions that render terrorism "less acceptable"? Unfortunately, the answer is, all too obviously, "no."

Accelerating Islam: Bush Policy in the Middle East

Louis J. Cantori, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

The Problem

There is an official U.S. policy of a global war against terrorism, and there is an American Middle East foreign policy of the one-sided support of the state of Israel and the democratization of the state of Iraq by force of arms. Analytically, what is called terrorism might be more accurately called guerrilla warfare or asymmetrical warfare. Whatever the preferred label, one thing is clear: The Islamists who have taken up the challenge of the American empire have acted resourcefully and intelligently. They have objectified their adversary, while American policy attributes to them an irrational evil and moral debasement. In doing so, America faces them after having unilaterally disarmed itself. In the process, the opportunities of the adversary to wreak havoc have increased exponentially. The more America struggles, the more its insecurity increases. The greater its effort, the greater the solidarity of the Islamic resistance movement mounted against it.

The intellectual challenge of this conflict in the Middle East is to analyze it in useful conceptual terms. This can be done by understanding that the Middle East itself possesses two intersecting systems: a domestic political system on the one hand, and an international sub-system on the other. What is common to both systems is the political collision of Islamism and American imperial objectives.

The Domestic Encounter

Domestically, Arabism (Nasserism and Baathism) has had its own successes and triumphs. It had vanquished European colonialism and imperialism by the 1960s. The result, however, has been the establishment of the tyrannical Arab state. This state has proven unable to address issues relating to Israeli imperialism and colonialism. It therefore has come under domestic challenge from the Islamic revival and Islamism. From the 1970s onward, in a partial movement towards reconciliation, moderate and radical Islamism began to make advances upon the tyrannical and repressive state. In Egypt, for example, initial concessions were made to Islamists by Sadat, only to be retracted. Mubarak has increased repression and virtually silenced radical Islam, as well as frozen moderate Islam in place. Something similar occurred in Jordan and Algeria before 1991. Elsewhere, in the periphery of the Middle East, however, the Islamic challenge was progressing more dynamically, notably in Iran in 1979 and in Turkey in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the Middle Eastern state under stress from Islam continued to be incapable of dealing with American-assisted Israeli imperialism and colonialism in the Occupied Territories. Perhaps the Arab states were at their most hapless after the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, especially with the Arab cooperation in the invasion of Iraq in 1991. What did they gain in the way of concessions for their services that might have relieved them of pressure from moderate and radical Islam?

The Regional Encounter

The most important background factor in the regional conflict between Islamism and American imperialism was the downfall of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan. The already messianic American foreign policy for advocacy of democracy then became redirected from "godless communism" to Islamism. A clue to the persistence of the underlying irrational qualities of American policy lies in a seemingly unending preoccupation with Samuel Huntington's 1993 book, Clash of Civilizations, by Americans and the world. Whether intended or not, the book was a message to the American political elite: such a clash was inevitable.

Second, just as the American messianic spirit was being liberated, Muslim arms in Afghanistan were also being liberated and their resolve strengthened and internationalized. This transformation of the Islamic resistance began to define the regional conflict of the 1990s. The major result was the release of pent-up grievances against American imperialism. No sooner was the Iraq war of 1991 over than a decade-long series of highly successful military attacks began to be carried out against Americans and American installations (Aden, 1992; Mogadishu, 1993; Riyadh, 1995; Dhahran, 1996; Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, 1998; Aden, 2000; etc.) As detailed in Imperial Hubris (Brassey's 2004) by former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer ("Anonymous"), these attacks were carefully thought out and on the whole brilliantly executed. Current analysis indicates that these were military actions carried out on a globalized battlefield by an international fighting force. The appropriate military label for these acts is "societal asymmetrical warfare" and not "terrorism." The latter term, among other things, disarms American policy by attributing irrational motivations to its opponents. As a consequence, one underestimates one's adversary. But, this adversary is rational and deadly, and his attacks are carried out by individuals who are sacrificing their lives for a cause, not committing suicide. The regional encounter for the most part during the 1990s was one in which the initiative of such attacks saw Islamists contending against American imperialism. Anonymous states that, in fact, America was repeatedly defeated militarily in these encounters. The earlier diplomatic history of the region finely tuned intra-Arab balances of power and an American policy of nuanced one-sided support for Israel. In the 1990s, the Americans went on the cultural offensive, resorted to military responses and lost one battle after the other. Ably led Muslim violence spread the field of the struggle around the world, even to America itself.

Conclusion

The confrontation continues. Balance of power has given way to a gloves-off attempt at domination by an American imperial power. Nonetheless, the separate layers of the conflict have remained analytically useful. The domestic dialectic will see no significant political change in the Middle East until Islamism captures the state either by revolution, as in Iran, or by constitutional means, as in Turkey. Radical Islam has as yet failed to seize control of a state from its tyrannical masters, due to the success of severe repression in the form of extrajudicial execution, mass imprisonment and torture. Moderate majority Islam has had minor participatory successes in, for example, Egypt and Jordan; unlike radical Muslims, however, moderates mistakenly expect gradualist liberal democracy to lead them to control of the state. A democratic outcome of the domestic encounter remains remote.

The regional and international encounter, on the other hand, has seen radical Islam take its struggle to its imperial adversary. In this global, asymmetrical war, the imperial power cannot be defeated, but neither can it defeat its adversary; the guerrilla has the world in which to swim. The crowning "success" of radical Islam thus far has been the 9/11 attack upon American soil. America took the struggle to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan but failed to capture or kill Bin Laden. The Bush administration then changed course and invaded Iraq. In doing this, America may have created the conditions of its own potential defeat. After a year and a half of having failed to do so, America must impose its military will upon Iraq to win. This is unlikely. All the guerillas have to do is to hold on until the Americans withdraw.

The rise to power of Islamists need not reverberate disastrously for American policy. The outcome of the regional conflict, on the other hand, in the event of an American withdrawal from Iraq, might forestall American investment opportunities in cheap Iraqi oil, render permanent American antimissile defense bases impossible, and make America's continued defense of Israel more difficult.

The Problem with Coercive Democratization

Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, Emory University

 [This contribution was published in full in the online
 publication, The Muslim World Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 1,
 Issue 1, October 2004.]

The Bush administration's initiative for democratic reform in the Arab world, formally launched by the president in a November 6, 2003, speech and subsequently elaborated in the "Greater Middle East Initiative," drafted for discussion at the G-8 summit in June 2004, has triggered a firestorm of criticism from leaders of the region's mainstream, nonviolent Islamist opposition groups. (22) Yet the Islamist reaction to the U.S. democracy initiative is more complex than it might first appear. Islamist leaders do not reject the principle of democratic reform per se; on the contrary, in their official programs and public statements, they claim to be among its staunchest advocates. What such leaders object to is not so much the content of the U.S. reform initiative as the ulterior motives they allege to lie behind it. In particular, Islamist leaders view the initiative as an effort to consolidate U.S.-Israeli hegemony in the region, both by engineering the rise of pliant, pro-U.S. regimes and by spreading Western secular and liberal values at the expense of Arab-Islamic identity and culture.

In a rare display of solidarity, Islamist and secular-nationalist opposition leaders joined with government officials to denounce the U.S. democracy initiative as a blatant case of foreign intervention in the affairs of sovereign Arab states. Hence, for example, referring to the U.S. initiative at a press conference this spring, Muhammad Mahdi Akef, the supreme guide of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, declared: "The Muslim Brotherhood rejects all shapes of foreign hegemony and denounces foreign interference into the affairs of Egypt or any other Arab or Islamic country." (23) Yet Islamists oppose the reform initiative not only because it is "foreign" but because of its sponsorship by the United States. Together with secular Arab nationalists and many establishment journalists and intellectuals, Islamist opposition leaders forcefully challenge the competence of the United States to promote democracy in the region. (24) As evidence, they point to a long history of U.S. support for pro-Western dictatorships as well as complicity in Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian territory and repeated violations of Palestinian rights. Recent developments have reinforced the view that the United States is almost uniquely ill-qualified to launch a region-wide process of democratic reform: U.S. backing of the Sharon government's military crackdown on Palestinian resistance, the American "war on terror" (viewed as an effort to contain Islamist groups more generally and as a rationale for wholesale restrictions on the rights of Muslim citizens of, and visitors to, the United States), the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the revelation of human-rights abuses by American military personnel at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Further, Islamists argue that, despite all the hype surrounding it, the democracy initiative is more a form of propaganda than evidence of a genuine shift in U.S. policy. Islamist leaders point to continued U.S. support for authoritarian leaders in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan--justified by U.S. officials as necessary for the prosecution of the "war on terror"--as evidence that U.S. policy has not really changed. They highlight the negligible resources allocated to democratization compared with those spent on U.S. military initiatives in Afghanistan and Iraq, as further proof that the reform initiative is more of a public-relations ploy than a commitment to real political change.

To the extent that Islamist leaders see the U.S. democracy initiative as more than mere window dressing, they claim it is dictated by U.S. strategic interests rather than by a genuine desire to empower Arab citizens to choose their own leaders in line with their own values and priorities. In particular, Islamists insist that U.S. leaders would never permit the holding of truly free and fair elections because they know that a government chosen by the majority would be more likely to challenge U.S. and Zionist interests than the region's incumbent regimes. As Azzam Huneidi, head of the Islamic Action Front OAF) bloc in the Jordanian parliament, baldly stated: "If there were truly free elections, the result would be a parliament that hated America." (25) Islamists thus fear that U.S.-led reforms will augment the role of pro-Western voices in Arab societies and push Islamist groups to the margins of political life.

Islamist opposition to the U.S. democracy initiative also stems from the concern that it aims to spread Western values at odds with the thawabet (fixed values) of Islam and the conservative social norms of the Arab majority. When leaders of the main Islamist opposition groups in Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait endorse democracy, they define it strictly as a set of procedural mechanisms for selecting leaders and making laws. The crucial implication here is that the procedures of democracy can be separated from the philosophies of secularism, materialism and individualism with which they are associated in the West. A look at the programs, statements and voting records of Brotherhood leaders in Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait reveals that their commitment to democracy stops short of tolerating personal and civic freedoms that might threaten the core values of Islam. While such values are typically cited in the abstract, they refer above all to the religious character of Arab-Islamic society and the position of the family, rather than the individual, as its basic social unit. This emphasis on collective values is pitched as a defense of religion and local ("national") culture, both of which are threatened by the global spread of Western secularism, consumerism and hyper-individualism, and the social pathologies they sow in their wake.

Anxiety about the spread of Western values feeds Islamist opposition to U.S.-led reforms. In Egypt and Jordan, Islamist members of parliament have protested recent programs to upgrade the quality of public education, including plans to reduce the traditional religious content of school curricula and introduce new materials promoting "human rights and tolerance," on the grounds that such changes represent a concession to American pressure and are intended to erode traditional values and life-styles. In Egypt, for example, two USAID grants for health and education development triggered a sharp debate in the Egyptian parliament before they were approved in June 2003. According to Adel Eid, an independent MP with an Islamist orientation, the implicit goal of the education grant was "to restructure Egyptian and Islamic values and traditions in an American way." Similarly, in January 2004, IAF leaders in Jordan's parliament protested Ministry of Education plans to modify school curricula, including the introduction of a human-rights matrix, as a capitulation to American pressure intended to weaken the Arab and Islamic identity of Jordanian citizens. For example, Adnan Hassuneh, an IAF leader who heads parliament's education committee, argued that the human-rights matrix opens the door to religious freedoms not accepted by Islam (such as the right of a Muslim to convert to another religion, or of a Muslim woman to marry a non-Muslim man) and promotes peace with Israel, which the IAF does not accept.

In Kuwait, too, Islamist leaders condemn U.S. efforts to spread liberal values at odds with local norms. In June 2004, a number of Islamists in parliament verbally attacked the U.S. embassy for sending staff members to diwaniyas (public meetings) to urge prominent Kuwaitis to support women's political rights. Others criticized U.S. diplomats for discussing with Kuwaiti citizens issues of marriage to a non-Muslim male or female, court testimony by women, polygamy and inheritance statutes. For example, Jasim al-Kandari, an Islamist parliamentarian, complained in a public statement issued on June 4 that U.S. diplomats were "interfering in our values, the provisions of our religion, legislation related to civil status and in what is permissible and what is impermissible." Framing Islamist opposition to the activities of U.S. diplomats as the defense of Kuwait's national sovereignty, the statement called for "a cessation of the pressures being exercised by the U.S. embassy and the U.S. State Department on Kuwaiti domestic affairs." (26)

Islamist reservations concerning the U.S. democracy initiative highlight a basic tension in the U.S. agenda which has yet to be fully acknowledged, let alone resolved. On the one hand, democratization entails a commitment to popular sovereignty, which, in modern times, translates into support for leaders chosen by a majority of the electorate. On the other hand, democratization entails the promotion of civil and political rights associated with democratic systems in the West. How then will the United States cope with the fact that the largest and most popular opposition groups in the Middle East do not share its liberal ideology but rather are committed to the Islamic reform of society and state? Should the United States encourage the holding of free and fair elections, knowing that they may allow groups with an illiberal agenda to gain power? If not, what sort of institutional or political constraints on free political competition should it endorse, and how can it strengthen secular liberal opposition groups (and encourage the liberalization of Islamist groups) without triggering accusations that it is trying to impose its values on others? These are some of the profoundly complex issues that U.S. officials have only begun to think about, let alone translate into a coherent set of policies.

While an overwhelming majority of Islamists oppose the U.S. democracy initiative, several Islamist leaders concede that they might benefit from it. As Esam Sultan of the Egyptian Wasat party explained, "U.S. efforts to impose democratic reform are not good, but they can have positive effects" by increasing pressure on local Arab governments to open up their political systems. (27) Nevertheless, Sultan observed, there is also the danger that reform will be rejected so long as it comes from the outside.

This leads to a final point. When asked what they wanted from the United States, Islamist leaders in Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait gave the same answer: leave us alone and let us chart a path of reform consistent with our own priorities. As Sultan put it, "We don't want America's help. We want relations based on interests. America should promote its interests and allow us to promote ours." Or, as one senior leader in Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood put it, "Respect our religion and our culture, and don't interfere in our domestic affairs. Leave us alone and we can solve our own problems. We can build our own democracy by our own efforts; we don't need your help. This is our task, not yours." (28)

In sum, mainstream Islamist opposition leaders in the Arab world are almost uniformly negative in their assessment of the U.S. democracy initiative. This is not because Islamists oppose the principle of democratic reform, but rather because they see the initiative as part of a wider U.S. policy agenda for the region that is systematically biased against Arab and Muslim interests. To the extent that they view it as more than propaganda, they fear that it is designed to strengthen pro-American sectors of Arab society and weaken more genuinely popular movements and parties that oppose U.S. policy in the region. In addition, Islamist leaders view American attempts to enlarge the scope of individual freedoms as an effort to impose Western values that contradict Islamic principles and produce massive social harm. The Islamist position thus entails an explicit rejection of the universality of the Western democratic model and invokes the principle of cultural pluralism to defend local beliefs and practices that contradict liberal democratic norms.

The challenge for U.S. policy makers at this juncture is to define the terms for a constructive engagement with mainstream, non-violent Islamist opposition groups without damaging its relationships with incumbent regimes. As the largest opposition groups in most Arab states, the Islamists cannot be excluded from the democratic reform process without casting the whole enterprise in doubt. Yet far more thought must be given to the question of how such groups might be integrated within a democratic framework without jeopardizing the democratic character of the framework itself. Unless and until this issue is addressed, the tensions between civil liberties and majority rule in the U.S. reform agenda will remain unresolved.

Bush Policy and the (De)stabilization of the Persian Gulf

Judith S. Yaphe, National Defense University

Many in this country and abroad would like to link the foreign and security policies of the George W. Bush administration to the destabilization of the Persian Gulf region. I do not. Many would like to blame the new-age world views of Mr. Bush's neoconservative advisers for the debacle in Iraq and the instability of the Persian Gulf region. I do not blame them for all the woes we and the region have encountered since their election in 2000 or since the horrific events of September 11. But I do hold them responsible for preaching a national-security doctrine that has alarmed friends in the region, cost the United States support for foreign-policy objectives, failed to protect American citizens and interests at home and abroad, and placed at risk regional friendships and alliances that have served American interests well in the region for more than 50 years.

This vital and fragile region has offered the United States risks and opportunities since we assumed the role of protector following the British withdrawal in 1971. Prior to that, the United States was known primarily for the coup that overthrew the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953, its growing support for the state of Israel, and its symbolic support for democratic institutions and undemocratic leaders. In a region that has long viewed the U.S. presence with a mixture of welcome and dread, governments must have wondered what was behind the administration's predictions of a short and happy war in Iraq, a welcome as liberators and not conquerors, the rapid transformation of the republic of fear that was Iraq into a democratically enlightened state living at peace with its neighbors, and democratic Iraq's role as a model for the entire Middle East to emulate.

A Dialogue of the Deaf

U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf under the Bush administration remain much as they were under previous administrations. U.S. policy has always been about having access to an unlimited supply of cheap oil, open seas and free trade, and doing no harm to Israel. The language of democracy, human rights, free speech, equal opportunity and women's suffrage has never been topmost in our diplomatic demarches. Our military and security dialogues have always been about Iraq's determination to use weapons of mass destruction and Iran's aspirations to achieve nuclear-weapons capabilities. Neither threat has impressed the Gulf states, who are prime consumers of security systems but who reject the threats those systems are aimed at containing. Regardless of which party is in power in Washington, the questions they pose remain, how long will you stay? Are you really committed to "us," and does "us" mean protecting the state, the people or the ruling families from themselves and each other?

Change is Inevitable

U.S. actions in Iraq and the consequences of liberation and occupation are not the main drivers of change in the Persian Gulf. Gulf leaders--all Sunni Arabs--fret about the implications of a Shia-dominated government coming to power in Baghdad and encouraging a corresponding Shia "awakening" in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain in particular.

Most, however, deny that democracy in Iraq will have any impact on their countries. They may be right. Daunting demographics (50 percent of the population of all the countries is under 18), high rates of unemployment and underemployment, repressive internal-security services, regime corruption and the inability to compete politically or economically with powerful extended ruling families are feeding a growing sense of frustration with the status quo. Rather than accept responsibility, Gulf leaders prefer to blame the United States, which they see as using globalization, a pervasive military presence, and a dogmatic approach to measuring loyalty as means to threaten regime change and undermine cultural norms and family values. U.S actions, some claim, are even to blame for the rise in Islamic extremism. If we had not removed Saddam, there would be peace, stability and no insurgency in Iraq. Much of this might be dismissed as hyperbole, except that the Bush administration appears to be creating new opportunities for regional governments to fail without a vision of what might follow.

The Solution: Clarity

The second Bush administration has indicated that issues of democracy and human rights are higher on its agendas for the region, albeit gradually and cautiously pursued. To move precipitously, however, on issues relating to direct elections, female suffrage and other human-rights issues, such as freedom of worship for non-Muslims and church construction, may raise the risk for governments facing criticism from their religious right wing. The administration may have to balance its professed interest in democratization with the real prospect of successor regimes that are far more anti-American than those now in power. The Greater Middle East Initiative and the Middle East Partnership Initiative are well on their way to becoming tools used by tacitly friendly regimes to underwrite their power rather than to encourage the emergence of civil society and a new entrepreneurial class.

The intelligence community has taken much of the blame for the failure of the Bush administration to know whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in 2003, whether Saddam was linked to al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden, and whether these posed an imminent threat to the United States. While the community is, in my judgment, guilty of linear thinking in assessing Iraq's possession of WMD and failure of imagination in dealing with the threat from Islamic extremists, the spin on analysis and the choice of "credible" sources of information were political decisions made by the Bush administration based on its need to justify a predetermined policy course.

The academic community was not asked for its views or assessments on these issues. The administration wanted validation and not debate of its policy choices by scholars or regional experts in or out of government. In addition, academics and government analysts are perceived as bending to the interests of their research and as incapable of independent judgment. Baldly stated, if a scholar or analyst says favorable things about Arab governments, politics or society, or is critical of Israel, then that scholar/analyst must have been co-opted and must be "antisemitic," meaning anti-Israel. But, as scholars and regional analysts, we must admit in all candor that there is a danger of clientitis and of wanting to protect access to resource materials. We also must admit that politicization occurs in intelligence work and in the academic environment. In both places, the tactic distorts truth and endangers policy judgments. It is a risk we cannot afford as a nation or a profession.

Can Middle East Political Reform Survive the American Embrace?

Michael C. Hudson, Georgetown University

 Free societies in the Middle East will be hopeful societies which no
 longer feed resentments and breed violence for export. Free
 governments in the Middle East will fight terrorists instead of
 harboring them, and that helps us keep the peace.... The terrorists
 know ... that a vibrant, successful democracy in the heart of the
 Middle East [Iraq] will discredit their radical ideology of hate....
 I believe in the transformational power of liberty.... Palestinians
 will hear the message that democracy and reform are within their
 reach, and so is peace with our good friend Israel.... And as freedom
 advances, heart by heart and nation by nation, America will be more
 secure and the world more peaceful.

 --President George W. Bush, acceptance speech, September 2, 2004

The president's latest utterance on America's policy to promote "the transformational power of liberty" in the Middle East will appear to most people in the Middle East (and perhaps elsewhere) as simplistic, cynical or impossible to achieve. But it deserves careful appraisal. When the world's "only remaining superpower" decides to do something in a particular part of the world, people should pay attention--especially those who live there.

I would like to pose five questions about the Bush administration's Middle East reform policy: (1) Will the establishment of liberal democracies actually "drain the swamp" of terrorism? (2) Can we dismantle the authoritarian political systems of the region and replace them with stable liberal democracies? (3) Will new liberal-democratic regimes serve American interests? (4) What would an empirical examination of U.S. reform efforts in the region reveal in the way of successes or failures? (5) How do indigenous reformers feel about America's reform agenda?

Will the establishment of liberal democracies eliminate or reduce "terrorist" activity?

Put another way, is authoritarianism the principal incubator of what the president calls "terror" and what the bipartisan 9/11 Commission Report designates as "Islamist terrorism"?

One must take this proposition with a grain of salt. It is true that Osama bin Laden and his associates singled out the authoritarian regime in Saudi Arabia as one of their complaints. But they also insisted that some 75 years of Western domination of the Islamic heartland was an essential grievance. If Saudi Arabia had been a liberal democracy but America and the West still dominated that country (even maintaining military bases) and the region in general, would the "terrorist movement" not have emerged, or failed to gain a foothold? Was Bin Laden's problem with Saudi Arabia that it was authoritarian or that its rulers behaved "un-Islamically," especially by consorting with the evil United States? Oddly, both President Bush and Bin Laden appear to put great store in freedom. But Bush's freedom is freedom from terrorists and tyrants, while Bin Laden's is freedom from Western (American) hegemony.

Another difficulty perhaps is the fact that authoritarian regimes in the region--many of them friendly to the United States--engaged in brutal struggles to eliminate what they saw as Islamist terrorist threats to their own regimes. The United States offered at least tacit encouragement to the regimes in Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia to crack down on these opposition movements. The United States, as Fawaz Gerges has demonstrated, was quite ambivalent about encouraging indigenous Islamist political organizations to participate in the limited liberalization programs that certain countries were undertaking.

We will not dwell on the point that the United States has at various times supported Islamist organizations committed to armed struggle against regimes or great-power rivals.

It might be objected that we have construed the American "liberal transformation" hypothesis too narrowly. Of course, it is not entirely clear from official pronouncements what the actual dimensions of reform are. There is no doubt that "freedom" is the core concept. Mention is also made of "democracy," but not as frequently as "freedom." This leaves open the possibility that the United States might accept in Iraq, for example, an Allawi-led regime that is "free" of Saddam Hussein, but whose "democracy" might be relatively muted--including a liberal, pro-American center but excluding nationalist or Islamist extremists. There is a broader interpretation of reform that emphasizes economic as well as political freedom. Here the proposition seems to be that liberal free-market reform will energize stagnant economies and raise the quality of life to such an extent that terrorist behavior will be muted. This rather reductionist economic determinism seems a bit out of place in a conservative American administration, but it seems to have broad resonance. One might ask, however, whether in a country like Morocco with a 20-percent unemployment rate, we could eliminate the 400 "terrorists" the government says are currently at large by reducing unemployment to 10 or 5 percent?

Does the United States have the capability, and the will, to dismantle the authoritarian political systems of the region and replace them with stable liberal democracies?

The economies of underdeveloped countries are not easily upgraded to middle-class status. The long history of American foreign aid and investment programs, not to mention those of the World Bank, the IMF and other wealthy countries, suggests that economic uplift is an extremely slow process. Even the relatively wealthy oil economies of the Middle East display many aspects of underdevelopment that might contribute to alienation and political radicalism. America's vast foreign-aid program in Egypt has neither raised Egypt substantially out of poverty nor created conditions that would erode political authoritarianism.

In his speech to the Republican party convention, President Bush mentioned the goal of making Iraq "a vibrant, successful democracy at the heart of the Middle East" that would stimulate a benign domino effect of democratization throughout the region. If the U.S. war in Iraq proves anything, it is that it is easier to depose a tyrant than to create in his place a "vibrant, successful democracy." Perhaps we need more time. But will a major American military presence in Iraq over the next 10 years or longer (which many experts in Washington are predicting) lead to such an outcome as long as most Iraqis maintain their negative attitudes toward the American occupation?

Furthermore, the American will to reform Arab autocracies (friendly ones, anyway), especially after September 11, 2001, and Washington's war on terrorism, is tempered by security concerns. Arab governments have seized on the current circumstances to tighten, rather than loosen, their domestic political controls. In view of the Bush administration's own contraction of political freedoms through the USA Patriot Act, its credibility in urging liberal reforms on others is understandably open to question.

Will new liberal-democratic regimes serve American interests?

To answer this question, we begin by invoking the old Chinese proverb: Beware of what you ask for; you might get it. In the Arab world, reformers working for political liberalization and democracy very often also strongly oppose certain American policies in the region. They ask: If the regimes in countries with close U.S. ties, such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia and Yemen (to name a few), were genuinely free and democratic, would they permit American military bases and many other facilities that buttress the American strategic hegemony in the region, especially while the U.S. military is occupying Iraq and the administration is turning a blind eye to Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories? The public-opinion polls from across the region are devastating evidence of the broad popular antipathy toward the United States.

What would an empirical examination of U.S. reform efforts in the region so far reveal in the way of successes or failures?

Notwithstanding the pessimistic tone of the above comments, it should not be assumed that the United States is totally incapable of promoting liberal reforms in the region. Though there have been no "transformations" of the kind President Bush is hoping for, there have been modest accomplishments. Some have been the result of diplomatic pressure, or jaw-boning. In their book on legislatures and democratic reform in the Arab world, Abdo Baaklini, Guilain Denoeux and Robert Springborg recount how the U.S. embassy in Kuwait pressured the ruling family to reinstitute democratic procedures after American and other forces had expelled the Iraqis from that country. They also report instances of American government pressure on Egypt in the 1990s to correct electoral irregularities. (29) The United States expressed such severe criticism of Egypt's jailing of the prominent reformer Saad Eddin Ibrahim that he was eventually released; but this was accomplished at the cost of angering the Egyptian political establishment over "highhanded foreign interference." Governments in Yemen and Jordan, anticipating American criticism, have undertaken modest relaxations of their authoritarian practices. There have also been a number of successful American-funded initiatives of a technical sort. Programs, for example, to upgrade the infrastructure of the Lebanese parliament and to promote voter-education programs for women in Yemen have presumably yielded positive results without eliciting accusations of American interference in local politics.

That said, it is worth quoting the conclusions of Sheila Carapico, who has studied U.S. foreign aid and democratization projects:

 Foreign funding for explicitly political projects raised the same
 kinds of doubts and suspicions as they would, and have, in the United
 States. The nonappearance of Islamist and Arab nationalist
 institutions among scores of recipients of democratization funds
 seemed to verify allegations of ideological bias. More than a few
 targets of feminist consciousness raising felt patronized, and joined
 their male colleagues in complaining that foreigners with little
 understanding of political realities controlled project purse
 strings. (30)

How do indigenous reformers feel about America's reform agenda?

This is what we might call the "kiss of death" question. It is important to underline that there has been a movement for liberal political reform among Arab intellectuals and within the political elites (especially the younger generation) going back at least to the early 1980s. Witness, for example, the considerable output of Beirut's Center for Arab Unity Studies on issues of democratic development (2004), civil society and political Islam. Long before the neoconservatives of the Bush administration discovered that promoting "freedom" might diminish the terrorist threat to America, indigenous reformers were grappling with these issues, albeit often in a hostile political environment.

Witness the frustration of these reformers, then, when the United States, whose policies in the region are so widely and deeply despised, moves in to co-opt the domestic reform agenda. While many local NGO and civil-society groups have welcomed support (direct or indirect) from the United States, they have also been acutely aware that their own standing could suffer from the association. To quote Carapico again,

 Meanwhile talented researchers grappled with the ethical implications
 of Western funding for projects critical of Arab governments and
 especially the Palestinian Authority. Furthermore, when their own
 governments used external financing as a pretext for censorship and
 censure, external patrons offered little recourse. Weighing the pros
 and cons of foreign funding at the turn of the century, several
 prominent groups and individuals had already concluded that the
 financial benefits were not worth the political risk. (31)

It is virtually impossible for Arab reformers not to question the bona tides of the U.S. government at the present juncture. Reluctantly, many of them recognize that America has the ability to influence local political affairs in a (limited) liberal direction, even if for entirely wrong reasons. At the same time, it is hard to find an Arab reformer who does not believe that the United States today is part of the problem, not the solution. The prominent Swiss Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan, whose U.S. visa was recently revoked, thus denying American students the freedom to listen to an important Muslim voice, captured the ambiguity of the reformers' situation in September 2004, in The New York Times:

 I believe Muslims can remain faithful to their religion and be
 able, from within pluralistic and democratic societies, to oppose
 all injustices. I also feel it is vital that Muslims stop
 blaming others and indulging in victimization. We are responsible
 for reforming our societies. On the other hand, blindly supporting
 American or European policies should not be the only acceptable
 political stance for Muslims who seek to be considered progressive
 and moderate. In the Arab and Islamic world, one hears a great deal
 of legitimate criticism of American foreign policy. This is not to
 be confused with a rejection of American values. Rather, the
 misgivings are rooted in five specific grievances: the feeling that
 the United States' role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is
 unbalanced; the long-standing American support of authoritarian
 regimes in Islamic states and indifference to genuine democratic
 movements (particularly those which have a religious bent); the
 belief that Washington's policies are driven by short-term economic
 and geostrategic interests; the willingness of some prominent
 Americans to tolerate Islam-bashing at home; and the use of
 military force as the primary means of establishing democracy. (32)

A Concluding Thought

It is clear that we cannot ascertain whether Arab political reform can survive the American embrace simply by examining the American side of the equation. The political reform movement in the Arab world has indigenous roots, and in its current incarnation it has been around at least since the 1980s. Some political scientists (e.g. Hudson 1988, (33) 1996 (34); Norton et. al. (35); Salame et. al. (36); Brynen, Korany and Noble (37)), though mindful of the obstacles, detected emerging challenges to the region's entrenched authoritarianism. In hindsight, perhaps some of the early analyses were overly optimistic; but most, I think, would contend that the reform currents are still significant and perhaps irreversible. While a "helping hand" from Washington can have limited positive results, it undermines liberal reform efforts and provides unintended support for radical Islamist and nationalist reform currents.

National Assembly Elections: Prelude to Democracy or Instability?

Eric Davis, professor of political science, Rutgers University

[The following text was not part of the roundtable.]

The Iraqi National Assembly elections of January 30, 2005, constitute an event of historical significance. Not since the June 1954 parliamentary elections have Iraqis had the freedom to vote in national elections. (38) Despite insurgent threats that "the streets would run with blood," millions of eligible Iraqis went to the polls and cast their votes. (39) Indeed, the election turnout reached almost 60 percent, high by any international standard. Conducting these elections was highly significant for Iraq, but also for the entire Middle East. Democratic reformers in neighboring Syria, Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will all be heartened by the ability of Iraqis to hold national elections. The "ripple effect" of Iraq's national elections will be felt in other authoritarian countries of the region as well, such as Egypt, Libya and Algeria. Nevertheless, it is one thing to hold national elections. It is quite another to forge a sustainable democracy.

The Election Environment

The most notable fact about the National Assembly elections is that they were held at all. Virtually all of the political actors outside Iraq, and many inside the country, opposed the elections. Despite its rhetoric about being committed to establishing democracy in Iraq, the United States never completely supported free and open elections after toppling Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime in April 2003. Under the plan put forth by L. Paul Bremer, the administrator of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), national elections were to be preceded by a series of caucuses that would have chosen candidates. Designed to ensure that the majority of candidates were not opposed to U.S. interests in Iraq, this idea quickly foundered in the face of strong opposition by the Hawza, the loose coalition of Shii religious organizations led by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. It was Sistani's insistence that national elections not be delayed and that they be based on one person, one vote, that paved the way for the January 2005 polling.

Although neighboring Iran was obviously pleased with the prospect of a Shii electoral victory in Iraq, it too had misgivings about free and open elections. As the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War demonstrated, Iraq's Shia considered themselves Iraqis first and Shiis afterward. (40) The war was the first Shii-Shii war fought in the modern era. That nationalism trumped religion in the war certainly gave the leadership of the Islamic Republic pause when contemplating whether Iraq's Shia were really their allies.

Following the fall of Saddam, the young firebrand Muqtada al-Sadr, son of the highly respected Shii cleric Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, whom the Baathist regime assassinated in 1999, created his so-called Mahdi Army. Seeking to take advantage of what he perceived to be a power vacuum in the Shii community, one of al-Sadr's first acts was to assert that only those clerics born in Iraq should be allowed to exercise political power. This was a clear reference to Sistani, who was born in Iran, and represented not only an effort to usurp Sistani's power but a rejection of Iranian influence in Iraq's domestic politics as well.

Iran's conservative leadership knew that Iraqi elections would only spur further calls for liberalization inside Iran. The prospects of Kurds, secularists, democratically minded Sunni Arabs and other minorities taking office in an Iraqi parliament held little appeal for Iran's hardline clerics. Iran only supported elections if it could be assured that groups it had supported, such as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, would come to power as a result.

Iraq's other neighbors abhorred the idea of free elections as well. Syria's Baath party was deeply shaken by the deposing of Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime. Already beset by struggles within the political elite between hardline supporters of the deceased president Hafiz al-Asad and younger supporters of his son and current president, Bashar, who favored limited reforms, the Syrian regime also faced calls for greater freedoms from a rapidly growing Islamist movement as well as a smaller liberal democratic reform movement. The Syrian regime viewed free elections in Iraq, which would only add to pressures for reforms at home, as very troublesome. By allowing large numbers of Iraq's ex-Baathist leadership to take refuge in Syria, the regime also opened itself to greater pressure from the United States to curb financial support for the insurgency from within Syria.

Saudi Arabia had other reasons to oppose elections in Iraq. Throughout the 1990s, the Saudi monarchy resisted U.S. and international efforts to aid the Shia of southern Iraq, who suffered most from the UN sanctions regime imposed on Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War. Fearful that Saudi Arabia's own restive Shii population, concentrated in the oil-rich northeastern area of the country, would demand greater rights and perhaps even a measure of local autonomy, the Saudi monarchy did not want to see a democratic model, which its own Shia could emulate, develop in neighboring Iraq.

The Hashemite monarchy in Jordan also opposed free elections in Iraq. Facing pressures to democratize from Islamist forces, many of which renounced violence and called instead for winning power through the ballot box, King Abdallah feared that truly free elections would give Islamists and a smaller number of Western-oriented reformers a landslide victory in the Jordanian parliament. Yet the Jordanian monarchy had other fears more regional than domestic in nature: an extension of Iranian influence to their common border with Iraq. Just before the elections, in an obvious attempt to encourage a high voter turnout among Iraq's Sunni Arab population, King Abdallah warned of a "Shii crescent" extending from Iran through Iraq and Syria and into southern Lebanon. The balance of power in regional politics, he warned, would be tilted in a dangerous direction.

But above all, Iraqis committed to democratic elections had to worry about the violent insurgency that has led to the loss of thousands of Iraqi lives. In a strange reconciliation among former enemies, ex-Baathists joined forces with Islamic radicals, some of whom were foreigners drawn to Iraq to fight the United States. (41) Radical Islamist groups such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Army of the Adherents of the Sunna, as well as a number of smaller groups, claimed that democracy was "anti-Islamic" and a plot by Western imperialism to undermine Iraq's Muslim character and cultural traditions, in their words, polling stations were "centers of atheism." (42) A number of blunders by the CPA, especially the wholesale dismissal of the Iraqi army during the summer of 2003, helped fuel opposition to the American occupation of Iraq and to many Iraqi politicians that cooperated with it. (43)

The Need for a New Conceptual Lens

No one predicted that the strongest advocate of democracy in Iraq would be its most prominent religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Sistani. When the CPA, under Paul Bremer's leadership, ignored Iraq's Shia, Sistani forced their interests onto the national political agenda. Although he never met with Bremer directly, Sistani sent messages through emissaries that made it clear he would accept nothing less than immediate elections without preconditions.

When, in August 2004, Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army began a second uprising against U.S. and allied forces, Sistani left Iraq, supposedly to receive treatment for heart problems in London. After it became clear that Sadr could not dislodge American forces from Najaf and other cities in the Shii south, Sistani returned to Iraq via Kuwait. Wending his way north in an automobile caravan towards al-Najaf, Sistani gathered a huge following of supporters along the way who followed him into the shrine city. Once there, Sistani was able to accomplish what the United States had been unable to do: to have Sadr's Mahdi Army surrender its weapons, dispense with violence and enter the political process.

Prior to the recent elections, it was Sistani who issued religious decrees stating that it was incumbent upon all Iraqis to vote in the January National Assembly elections. Although he continued to distance himself from direct involvement in politics, Sistani played a major role in forging the United Iraqi Alliance; which emerged as the dominant political force in the elections, having won the largest number of seats in the new National Assembly.

What these developments suggest is the need to view Iraq through a different conceptual lens. This is especially true of American policy makers, who entered Iraq with little or no understanding and appreciation of the country's political dynamics. That the major force behind Iraq's democratization in the wake of 35 years of Baathist authoritarianism should be the spiritual leader of Iraq's Shii community indicates that there is no necessary contradiction between Islam and democracy. Thus, the elections undermine the stereotype that Islam and democracy are necessarily polar opposites. While American and Western policy makers may feel uncomfortable interacting politically with members of the Hawza and their counterparts in the Sunni Arab religious establishment, clerics will need to be taken seriously as political actors as a result of the recent elections. Obviously, the U.S. efforts to marginalize religious elements was a failed policy.

The United States and many other Western and even regional states have traditionally viewed Iraq through an ethnic lens that assumes rigid and static political identities. However, meetings held between Shii and Sunni Arab religious parties and organizations after the January elections suggest that there may be considerable cooperation in the future by religious forces that transcends ethnic lines. (44) In other words, the most important political cleavage in the wake of the National Assembly lessons may become that of secularists versus those political forces that seek to impose a more Islamist understanding of politics and society on Iraq. In this process, a cross-ethnic alliance of Shii and Sunni Arabs (and perhaps even some Kurdish Islamist organizations) could gain in strength.

The Role of the Kurds

One of the most important results of the Iraqi elections is the powerful showing of the Kurdistan Coalition List which constitutes an alliance between the two main Kurdish political parties, the Kurdish Democratic Party, headed by Massud Barzani, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, headed by Jalal Talabani. The Kurds, who historically have been badly treated by the central government in Baghdad, have demanded that the new Iraqi constitution, that will be written under the auspices of the new National Assembly, structure Iraq along federalist lines. Having gained second place in the January voting, the Kurds stand ready to play an important role as power brokers in the composition of the new National Assembly. If the Kurds throw their political support to the United Iraqi Alliance, it will allow Islamist groups to push their religious agenda within the new parliament. If, on the other hand, the Kurds decide to support secular forces, such as the Iraqi List of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, and secular forces within the United Iraqi Alliance and among Iraq's Sunni Arabs, the National Assembly's agenda may take on a very different political hue.

The Political-economy Dimension

Since the fall of Saddam and the Baath party, public-opinion polls have demonstrated a continued strong commitment to establishing democracy in Iraq. However, Iraqis give greater importance to personal security and a decent standard of living. The national unemployment rate is estimated at 65 percent, which is probably even higher among men and women under the age of 25. Clearly, Iraq's political difficulties have been exacerbated by the poor state of its economy. Unfortunately, much of the funding that the United States has supplied to Iraq has gone to large infrastructural projects, while only a relatively small amount has been used to provide employment for Iraqis. The post-war inflation has only increased the economic problems for those who are without work. There is little doubt that many of the recruits to insurgent organizations are motivated by nationalist concerns. However, it is also clear that most of these recruits lack gainful employment. After the fall of the Baathist regime, many Iraqis were led to believe that the economy would experience a dramatic improvement due to an influx of U.S. economic assistance. Not only is the Iraqi economy very weak, but the discrepancy between the expectations of the populace and actual economic performance further embittered many Iraqis, especially young people who have little hope for the future.

One way to strengthen Iraqi democracy will require foreign donors such as the United States, the EU and prosperous Arab states to contribute funds that will provide employment for Iraqis until the economy can regain its strength, particularly after the oil industry has been able to reconstitute itself, a prospect that is still several years in the future. The political economy of Iraqi democracy will remain an important issue for the foreseeable future. Democracy cannot sustain itself in Iraq in the face of economic stagnation.

Strategies for Democratic Activists

Iraqis will not be inclined to support democratically elected governments if they cannot improve the economic life of the country as a whole. But improving the economy is closely linked to repressing the insurgency that continues to plague Iraq. If insurgent attacks are to end, a military strategy alone will not be successful. One strategy that the new Iraqi government can promote is "micropolitics," an effort to encourage contending political parties and organizations to negotiate their differences. Such a strategy would establish an ongoing dialogue among Iraq's major political groups not only to pave the way for solving the differences among contending political forces, but also to promote trust among Iraq's key political actors.

Another strategy is to use historical memory to promote reconciliation among Iraq's myriad political organizations. (45) The positive accomplishments of the Iraqi nationalist movement prior to February 1963, when the first Baathist regime seized power, included creating cross-ethnic alliances, establishing a nascent civil society, fostering associational life, including a large number of professional, labor, women's and artistic organizations, creating a vibrant press, and promoting literary and artistic innovations that enhanced political and cultural tolerance. (46) Although the mainstream of the Iraqi nationalist movement was dealt a serious blow in 1963 and afterward, the positive legacy of the broader Iraqi nationalist movement is still very much alive. The new Iraqi government might employ older nationalists, including artists, intellectuals and university faculty, to bring this positive historical memory to the attention of Iraqi youth. Through television and radio programs, folklore that emphasizes the shared traditions of all Iraq's ethnic groups, films and artistic exhibitions, articles in the press--which now numbers over 200 newspapers-and secondary school textbooks, this positive history, which began before World War I, can demonstrate to Iraqis that democracy is not an alien form of government but one grounded in their own nationalist traditions.

Building "Thick" Democracy

The process of building democracy in Iraq will not be easy. Unlike the neoconservative vision of democracy advocated by the Bush administration, which envisioned an Iraqi government with limited involvement in the country's social and economic affairs--what some have referred to as the "night watchman state"--the new Iraqi government will have to eschew a "thin" version of democracy. "Thick" democracy implies active involvement by the government in the country's social and economic affairs so as to promote national reconciliation. This has been necessary in other countries that have experienced severe social trauma, such as South Africa, the Balkan countries and Rwanda. Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime promoted sectarianism and intentionally undermined trust among Iraq's constituent ethnic groups. The challenge of the new Iraqi government will not only be to establish a viable coalition in the National Assembly but to reconstitute a sense of trust and hope in the future that will allow Iraqis to leave the negative legacy of Baathist rule behind.

(1) Donald Rumsfeld, "Global War on Terrorism," 2003.

(2) Les Roberts et. al., "Mortality before and after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: Cluster Sample Survey," The Lancet, October 29, 2004. Also see Lila Gutman, "Lost Count," Chronicle of Higher Education, February 4, 2005, for a discussion of how this rigorous demographic study was buried in the period preceding the 2004 presidential election, http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/122/22a01001.htm.

(3) Michael R. Gordon, "The Strategy to Secure Iraq Did Not Foresee a 2nd War," The New York Times, October 19, 2004.

(4) Daniel Byman, Kenneth M. Pollack and Gideon Rose, "The Rollback Fantasy," Foreign Affairs, 1999. "Even if rollback were desirable, any policy to achieve it would have to pass three tests to be considered seriously. It would have to be militarily feasible, amenable to American allies whose cooperation would be required for implementation, and acceptable to the American public. All current rollback plans involving the Iraqi opposition come up short. Those who tout these nostrums as superior to existing U.S. policy are therefore either engaging in wishful thinking or cynically playing politics. Either way, for the United States to try moving from containment to rollback in Iraq would be a terrible mistake that could easily lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths."

(5) Kenneth M. Pollock, Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York: Random House, 2002).

(6) Deborah Solomon, "Questions for Kenneth Pollack," The New York Times Magazine, 2004, http:// www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/magazine/24QUESTIONS.html?oref-login& pagewanted=p ...

(7) It is not as though many of problems went unanticipated, but skeptics were closed out of the "loop" in my experience. For a splendid and prescient article foreseeing many of the problems that did arise, see James Fallows, "The Fifty-First State?" The Atlantic, November 2002. Also see my own skepticism in "The Long Haul in the Middle East," a paper commissioned for publication and for presentation at an Army War College sponsored meeting at the University of Maine, October 20, 2002. The Army War College declined to publish the critical paper and suggested that I could publish it in an "academic journal," although the paper did circulate among army officers as samizdat.

(8) Kenneth Adelman, "Cakewalk in Iran," The Washington Post, February 13, 2002.

(9) Kenneth Adelman, "Saddam's State of Terror," The Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2002.

(10) Fouad Ajami, "Letter to the Editor," Foreign Policy, 2004.

(11) William Kristol, "The End of the Beginning," The Weekly Standard, Vol. 8, No. 34, 2003.

(12) Reuel Marc Gerecht, "A Necessary War: Unless Saddam Hussein Is Removed, the War on Terror Will Fail," The Weekly Standard, Vol. 8, No. 6, 2002.

(13) Reuel Marc Gerecht, "Why We Need a Democratic Iraq," The Weekly Standard, March 24, 2003.

(14) Larry Diamond, "Iraq's Democratic Revolution," The Wall Street Journal, February 19, 2004.

(15) Bill Keller, "The Sunshine Warrior," The New York Times Magazine, September 22, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/22/magazine/22WOLFOWITZ,html?page wanted=print&p...

(16) Larbi Sadiki, The Seareh for Arab Democrao,: Discourses and Counter-Discourses (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

(17) Has or will the issue of sectarianism become a revived topic for debate in the Arab world? It is hard to imagine that the ascendancy of Iraq's Shia will not affect identity politics in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Bahraini informants emphasize that vibrations from Iraq are being deeply felt. In turn, will we see governments becoming more accommodating to Shii constituents as we seem to be witnessing in Bahrain?

(18) In general, U.S. officials have tended to "misunderestimate," to coin a term, the social resilience of the insurgency in Iraq. In Lebanon, the Israeli army faced a resistance force with a full-time cadre of less than 500. Other fighters were weekend mujahideen--mechanics, optometrists, bakers--who disappeared for a few days on operation and then returned to work. That force prompted a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000. In Iraq, as in Lebanon, a village force of five or ten draws strength from cousins, friends and co-religionists and grows accordion-like--5,000 becomes 25,000. In late October, U.S. officials estimated that there were 10,000 to 12,000 insurgents, or more than double the number estimated in late 2003.

(19) Peter W. Galbraith, "Iraq: The Bungled Transition," The New York Review of Books, 2004.

(20) Robert Kagan, "'Lowering Our Sights'," The Washington Post, May 2, 2004.

(21) http://www.diplomatsforchange.com/contact/contact.shtml.

(22) This brief draws on research I conducted this year in Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait on the causes and dynamics of Islamist auto-reform. Supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the United States Institute of Peace, this research included 46 interviews with political activists, journalists and researchers, many of whom were affiliated with the non-violent mainstream of the Islamic Trend.

(23) Hamdy Al Husseini, "Muslim Brotherhood Submits Own Initiative for Reform," Islam On-Line, March 4, 2004. Akef made this remark at a Brotherhood press conference in Cairo on March 4, 2004, in which he outlined the Brotherhood's own reform agenda.

(24) See Marina Ottoway, "Promoting Democracy in the Middle East: The Problem of U.S. Credibility," Middle East Series, Democracy and Rule of Law Project, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, No. 35, March 2003.

(25) Interview with the author, June 29, 2004, Amman.

(26) "Kuwaiti Deputy Criticizes U.S. Embassy 'Interference' in Domestic Affairs," Quds Press News Agency, London, June 5, 2004.

(27) Interview with the author, March 8, 2004, Cairo. Mubarak al-Duwailah, a leader in the Islamic Constitutional Movement in Kuwait, made a similar argument.

(28) Comments from a group interview with Muhammad Mahdi Akef, Abd al-Munem Abu-l-Futuh and Esam al-Aryan at the Muslim Brotherhood's headquarters, March 16, Cairo.

(29) Abdo Baaklini, Guilain Denoeux and Robert Springborg, Legislative Politics in the Arab World: The Resurgence of Democratic Institutions (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1999).

(30) Sheilo Carapico, "Foreign Aid for Promoting Democracy in the Arab World," Middle East Journal, Vol. 56, No. 3, Summer 2002, pp. 379-95.

(31) Ibid., pp. 395.

(32) The New York Times, September 1, 2004.

(33) Michael C.Hudson, "Democratization and the Problem of Legitimacy in Middle East Politics," Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, Vol. 22, No. 2, 1988, pp. 157-72.

(34) Michael C. Hudson,, "Obstacles to Democratization in the Middle East," Contention, Vol. 5, No. 2, Winter 1995, pp. 81-106.

(35) Augustus Richard Norton, ed., Civil Society in the Middle East, 2 vols. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994, 1996).

(36) Ghassan Salame, ed., Democracy Without Democrats? The Renewal of Politics in the Muslim World (London: I.B. Tauris, 1994).

(37) Rex Brynen, Bahgat Korany and Paul Noble, eds., Political Liberalization and Democratization in the Middle East." Theoretical Perspectives, Vol. 1 (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1995).

(38) For a discussion of the June 1954 elections, see Eric Davis, Memories of State: Politics, History and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq (University of California Press, 2005), pp. 100-10. Unfortunately, the June elections, which led to democratic forces winning seats in Baghdad's and Mosul's most important electoral districts, were annulled the following month by the perennial prime minister and strongman Nuri al-Said.

(39) A statement published on January 26, 2005, by the al-Qaeda Organization in Iraq, headed by Abu al-Musab al-Zarqawi, reads as follows: "Your brothers in the military wing of the al-Qaeda organization in Iraq announce they are ready to wash the streets of Baghdad with the blood of the voters," http://www.islam-minbar.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=940& forum=3.

(40) On Shii attitudes towards the war, see Eric Davis, "The War's Economic, Political Damage to Iraq," The New York Times', October 7, 1980.

(41) For a discussion of the insurgency, see the interview with the former high-ranking Baathist, Salah al-Mukhtar, where he discusses this alliance. See the interview (in Arabic) in the Kurdish newspaper, Hawlati, December 22, 2004.

(42) In a taped speech on January 23, 2005, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi raised seven arguments for why democracy equals heresy. According to him, Muslim warriors must wage jihad against the soldiers of the idol of democracy, whether these [soldiers] be crusaders or their democratic agents who are apostates according to Islam (Murtaddun).... The enemies of Allah, the crusaders, and the apostate groups, have closed ranks and agreed to establish an infidel democratic government in Iraq, despite differences in their schools of thought and political viewpoints. In contrast, the Jihadist warriors have no united leadership, and no general imam to whom they have sworn allegiance ...., http://www.alm2sda.net/vb/show thread.php?t=6822.

(43) For a discussion of CPA policy in Iraq, see Eric Davis, "Democracy's Prospects in Iraq," Foreign Policy Research Institute E-Note, June 30, 2004.

(44) "al-Hakim Yaqud Ijtimaat al-Tafahum ma al-Qiyadat al-Suniya" ([Abd al-Aziz] al-Hakim Holds Consultative Meetings with the Sunni Leadership), al-Zaman, February 8, 2004.

(45) See, "History Matters: Past as Prologue in Building Democracy in Iraq," Orbis, Vol. 49, No. 2, Spring 2005, pp. 1-16.

(46) For a discussion of the Iraqi nationalist movement, see Davis, Memories of State, esp. Chapters 2-5.