Prisoners of History & Freedom's March

Unlike most observers and bloggers, I've spent the last several years afraid of widespread "democracy" protests in the Middle East. Because so many people are so ignorant of the history of the region, or just overly optimistic, they don't understand what the ramifications of what we're seeing today.

To be fair, President George Walker Bush didn't understand the ramifications of democracy, either. After the death of Yassir Arafat, Bush pushed for elections in the Palestinian Authority, over the objections of both Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and PA President Mahmood Abbas, who feared that Hamas was poised to win large majorities. Bush prevailed and, predictably, Hamas won large majorities. The same thing happened in Lebanon after the Syrians evacuated, and Hezbollah won the balance of power.

Democracy, especially in the Middle East, isn't all it's cracked up to be. Just look at Iraq, an artificial country with deep sectarian divides. Freedom unleashed those divides and they proceeded to kill as many or more innocent people as Saddam did. Let's assume that Iran became a true democracy tomorrow. There is absolutely no evidence that this would cause Tehran to end it's nuclear program or abandon its enmity toward Israel. Sure, there's a lot of wishful thinking to that effect, but no actual evidence.

The great Dr. Dawg, who I like and respect, wrote an eloquent, if slightly misleading article about the attitudes of people such as myself toward the recent protests in the Middle East.

I think it’s fair to observe that the commenter in question sums up rather well the conservative case against democracy.

The problem with democracy, of course, is that the people get to make choices, and not all of those choices are ones we would support ourselves. Indeed, they themselves might eventually regret the choices they made. The people, therefore, cannot be trusted—well, those people, anyway.

(...)

Hence the conflation of Iran with Egypt—those Muslim countries all look alike. The conservative viewpoint is clear: democracy is for smart white folks like us, not for swarthy crypto-jihadis waiting to burst forth and win elections and whatnot.

I was disappointed to see this rhetoric from Dawg, who is one of the more rational and thoughtful commentators on the left. While I'm sure that it does reflect some quarters of the right, I don't think it reflects a majority, or even a strong minority of conservative opinion. After all, the right couldn't have been more supportive of President Bush's "Democracy Agenda" and the 2009 Iranian protests. I disagreed strongly with it and I did so in public, but race, religion or ethnicity had nothing to do with that disagreement.

Democracy doesn't just flower overnight. Most Republicans who suggest that it does point to Japan after the Second World War, overlooking the fact that the Japanese were under military occupation for nearly a decade and that their democratic constitution was written for them by Douglas MacArthur.

The success or failure of a democratic experiment is almost wholly reliant on the historical circumstances under which it is carried. Egypt's recent history, like that of the entire Middle East, is ghastly and suggests that democracy can only produce more war, terrorism and hatred, not less.

After the war, the British adopted the monarchy as a figurehead government and trained and funded its secret police to destroy their enemies, among them, the then-moderate Muslim Brotherhood. After the 1952 revolution toppled the monarchy, the Soviets filled that role for Nasser. And then Sadat and Mubarak became the puppets of the Americans.

One thing that never changed was the foreign sponsorship of government terror and the regime's political enemies. Any organized, democratic opposition was jailed, tortured, murdered or exiled years ago, which was not only tolerated by the West, but funded by it as well. That leaves the dangerous radicals as the only organized alternative to the Mubarak regime.

The example of the Iranian Revolution is also instructive. The Revolution was actually a coalition between the Islamists and various Marxist groups. Within a year of the Shah's exile, the Mullahs simply had the democratic Marxists killed. Organization isn't just the most important thing in the aftermath of a revolution, it's the only thing.

Assuming that what's happening in Cairo and Alexandria is a democratic revolution, it almost certainly won't stay that way for very long. If, in fact, Mubarak's days are numbered, it is just as likely that the military will take over as it is that there will be "free and fair" elections, which democratic forces would almost certainly lose. That also assumes that elections would even occur.

Revolutions are an unpredictable business. In many ways, we - people who genuinely hope for stable and prosperous democracies in the Muslim world - are prisoners of our own history and our own past bad deeds. The same thing happened in Africa after decolonization. Free institutions were never built or smothered in their cribs and kleptocracies flourished for a half century, and that happened with our blessing. Kleptocrats like Mobuto, you see, better served our strategic interests than did the possibility of communism.

More important is the fact that radical groups have learned to become an attractive alternative to existing regimes. Hamas provided vital social services to the populace of Gaza that the Arafat government refused to. Hezbollah did the same thing in southern Lebanon, rebuilding Beirut after the 2008 war faster and more thoroughly than the United States has rebuilt New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

The worst possible scenario is a weak, ineffective democratic government that doesn't control the country. If that happens, Islamist elements will use the lack of internal security to attack Israel with impunity, knowing that Israel will respond against the Egyptian people. It is in no one's interest that we return to the bad old days before Camp David, when war was a regular feature of life in the region.

I'm sure that Dr. Dawg doesn't wish to see radical groups seize control of Egypt, nor do I think that he sees them as a truly democratic alternative. The only problem is that they are the only plausible alternative, at least they are right now. Dawg may well believe in a triumph of the human spirit, which heroically overcomes the high hurdles of history. I don't. I believe in what is likely in the immediate future, given the cards that history has dealt us.

Democracy might well flourish in Egypt and in the broader Middle East, but that will take years, if not decades. The Soviet Union did not immediately transition from Stalinism to democracy and it's unrealistic to think that it will happen in the Muslim world. That's not racist or anti-Islamic, it's just how history tends to work.

We could have embraced, nurtured and moderated democratic alternatives to the autocratic regimes of the Arab and Muslim world's during the Cold War. We didn't and we see the ramifications of that today. We're trapped with heinous and awful "allies" like the House of Saud because the alternatives are so much worse than we are.

We're all prisoners of history - you, me, Dawg, Hosni Mubarak and the Egyptian people - we might not like that history and do our best to hide from it, but it always catches up with us.