This is the third in a series. The bulleted points below are culled from many sources. They are compiled to show how much information on an issue is available to those who are seeking it.
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Democracy and the accompanying rise of political and civic institutions are the only route to a better world – and because the work is difficult doesn’t mean it can be ignored.
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The previous strategy in the Middle East failed – it brought about 9/11. To get a different result, we needed a different strategy.
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For decades, a “realism” based on a myopic perception of international stability prevailed in the policy-making debate. For a brief period during the Cold War, the realist policy of accommodating Soviet tyranny was replaced with a policy that confronted that tyranny and made democracy and human rights inside the Soviet Union a litmus test for superpower relations.
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That policy was enormously successful in bringing the Cold War to a peaceful end. Policy makers, however, have continued to advocate an approach to international stability that included coddling “friendly” dictators in the Middle East and refusing to support the aspirations of oppressed peoples to be free.
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The notion that prior to the Bush Administration (and The Freedom Agenda) we had achieved “stability” in the Middle East is historically unserious:
- Is the 1967 Arab-Israeli war an example of “stability”?
- The 1973 Arab-Israeli war?
- The previous Israeli clashes with Hezbollah (which led to an 18-year Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon)?
- The two Palestinian intifadas that took place in the last 20 years?
- The Iran-Iraq war (which saw more than one million casualties)?
- Perhaps the Iraq-Kuwait war?
- The Syrian occupation of Lebanon?
- The 1982 massacre in Hama?
- The Jordanian expulsion of thousands of Palestinians in the early 1970s?
- Are the nations “stable” that produced the men who on September 11th flew planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and downed a jet liner in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania?
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In his essay in the latest Commentary magazine, Norman Podhoretz wrote that the “50 years of peace” (to use a formulation by Brent Scowcroft) brought us about two dozen wars. This hardly qualifies as “stability.”
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The Bush administration believes the problem isn’t simply the faux stability of the Middle East; it is, more fundamentally, the lack of political liberty and free institutions in the Arab Middle East. Attempting to correct this deeply rooted problem, one might hope its critics would grant a bit more than a year or two or three for it to succeed.
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Then came Sept. 11, 2001. It seemed as though that horrific day had made it clear that the price for supporting “friendly” dictators throughout the Middle East was the creation of the world’s largest breeding ground of terrorism. A new political course had to be charted.
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Today, we are in the midst of a great struggle between the forces of terror and the forces of freedom. The greatest weapon that the free world possesses in this struggle is the awesome power of its ideas.
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The last four American presidents made mistakes in the Middle East. We have few good choices in dealing with terrorism, theocracy and authoritarian madness of an oil-rich Middle East.
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This conflict is not, in the end, about Bin Laden, or even Al Qaeda. It’s about a reactionary form of Islam with a worldwide network, including elements in the United States, and that reactionary force is absolutely dedicated to violence and has been for the two hundred and some years that’s it’s been in existence.
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The kind of attack that’s possible with a WMD makes containment an inadequate solution. You have to start thinking preemption. When you’re dealing with new problems, you sort them out, you do the best you can, and you keep learning.
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Past Middle East policies were unsustainable; after all, oppression allowed bin Ladenism to take root and grow. Having identified the problem and address it doesn’t mean the problem is solved.
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We are at the outset of what may well be a historic transition — and such transitions can be jolting and uneven. The Bush administration’s “solution” is not to create “instability.” It is to assist in the rise of liberty and civic habits in the Middle East. That will take longer to achieve than the historical blink of an eye.
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One thing we know for sure: we were never going to get there under a policy that looked away from, or even promoted, tyrannical regimes in the Arab world.
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The first choice, a return to what was practiced throughout the 1980s and 1990s, is easy and offers short-term relief with little controversy. But the second path, which we have taken to prevent another 9/11, is hard, lengthy and thus unpopular. Yet it holds out the promise of long-term solutions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Presidents Reagan, Bush senior and Clinton, who respectively skedaddled out of Beirut, skipped Baghdad and fled from Mogadishu, didn’t risk, lose or solve much against the terrorists.
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In contrast, George W. Bush wagered everything by going into Afghanistan and Iraq. And he will either make things much worse or much better for millions – depending on how successfully the United States can endure the messy type of war that jihadists welcome and the American military usually seeks to avoid.
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Imagine this war as a sort of grotesque race. The jihadists and sectarians win if they can kill enough Americans to demoralize us enough that we flee before Iraqis and Afghans stabilize their newfound freedom. Prosperity, security and liberty are the death knell to radical Islam. It’s that elemental.
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Did the president fail to appreciate the wisdom of the “realist” school of foreign policy? No, he considered and rejected their approach. “For decades,” President Bush explained, “free nations tolerated oppression in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In practice, this approach brought little stability and much oppression, so I have changed this policy.”
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Critics think it is naïve to promote democracy in the Middle East. Elections, they say, have brought Hamas to power in the Palestinian areas, gave the Muslim Brotherhood seats in the Egyptian parliament and provided Hezbollah a share of power in Lebanon.
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And yet, as Fouad Ajami, Middle East Studies professor at Johns Hopkins, has written, “while the ballot is not infallible, it has broken the pact with Arab tyranny.”
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World War IV is the fight against Islamofascism (with the Cold War designated as World War III). It will require heavy sacrifices and patient resolve. President Bush has demonstrated tremendous resilience. Yet a massive failure of nerve seems to afflict most of the opinion-making elite in America.
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Considering the level of defeatism rampant in the press, among public intellectuals and among the political leadership, it is perhaps even more amazing that so many young Americans have answered the call and donned the uniform. Norman Podhoretz writes: “In their determination, their courage, and their love of country, they are by all accounts a match, and more than a match, for their forebears of World War II and World War III.”
