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The National Interest
Where Credit Is Due
by Rachel Bronson
A sudden burst of political activity has jolted the Middle East. Iraq's historic January 30 elections transpired with considerably less violence than predicted. Two weeks later, male citizens in Saudi Arabia went to the polls to vote in the Riyadh province's first ever municipal elections, followed by similar elections elsewhere in the country. In Lebanon, the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri galvanized massive protests against the Syrian occupation. In Palestine, citizens not only freely elected a new leader, but the Palestinian Authority rejected Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei's crony cabinet, forcing him to incorporate younger, less-beholden politicians. Soon thereafter, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak suddenly announced that the Egyptian political system would be opened to more than just one candidate. In May, Kuwaiti women won the right to vote and run in parliamentary elections. Winds of change are blowing through the Middle East.
Why this cascade of political developments, and why now? President Bush and his supporters credit the breathtaking pace of recent events to the transformational aspect of the president's foreign policy. His critics, on the other hand, point to circumstances that have created a perfect storm for reform. Over the last decade, local activists from Morocco to Bahrain have taken strides toward political reform. Jordan has been experimenting with different election rules and various forms of representation. The participation of women in Yemen's electoral process increased from 500,000 to 1.5 million between the 1993 and 1997. Yasir Arafat's death catapulted into positions of prominence a new generation of Palestinian leaders, many of whom have been working against corruption, political stagnation and diplomatic intransigence for over a decade. For this school of thought, today's calls for reform are the outgrowth of yesterday's hard-fought battles.
Both the president's supporters and critics point to real factors pushing toward change. But while critics too easily downplay the underlying force behind today's events, the White House seems dangerously cavalier about the direction that change will take. Although critics are loathe to admit it, removing Saddam Hussein did unleash forces for change in the region, which local activists are capitalizing on today. What the Bush Administration misses, however, is that reform has been slow to take root in the region not because of a naive belief around the world that Middle Easterners are somehow incapable of building democracies, but because the civic institutions needed for such a project were systematically undermined in the Middle East throughout the Cold War. Unless such institutions are painstakingly cultivated, elections in Palestine and Iraq will not have the "demonstration effect" that the Bush Administration desires.
What the Iraq War did was shatter the final vestiges of mid-20th-century politics lingering on in the Middle East. For 15 years, the end of the Cold War, which launched a third wave of democratization in some places and a descent into chaos in others, was delayed in the Middle East. In 2005, the early lights of 1989 are dawning in the region. Whether the region will follow the path of eastern Europe or the more disheartening one of Central Asia will depend on the abilities of the reform movements that grew up in the 1990s and sustained international--but especially American--involvement.
No Peace Dividend
For most of the world, the end of the Cold War ushered in a moment of political opportunity. Across the globe, reduced foreign aid and military assistance, coupled with external pressures to democratize and fertile political foundations, allowed local activists a greater space to agitate for reform. It provided an opportunity for bottom-up change that in some places, like eastern Europe, where nascent democratic and other civic institutions existed, resulted in movement toward democracy. In other places, where such institutions were weak or non-existent, popular dissent resulted in the replacement of one authoritarian leader with another or, worse, outright chaos.
Middle Easterners, however, experienced something very different, because the region did not change as dramatically as the rest of the world. Middle Eastern states did not follow the trend toward economic decentralization and integration. Highly centralized states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia were unable or unwilling to diversify and privatize key sectors of their economies. While the Washington Consensus pressed economic liberalization elsewhere, in the Middle East security concerns prevailed.
Bucking international trends and continuing its Cold War policies, the Middle East remained the world's largest non-OECD arms market during the 1990s. The region's total annual defense expenditure in 1998 was around $60 billion, compared with $9.7 billion for sub-Saharan Africa, $21 billion for Central and South Asia, and $37 billion for Central and South America. At 7 percent of GDP, Middle Eastern defense expenditure was the highest for any region of the world.
The Middle East largely continued its Cold War policies because on August 2, 1990, a mere nine months after the Berlin Wall crumbled, 100,000 Iraqi troops marched into Kuwait. In response, the United States led one of the most wide-ranging and dominant coalitions ever assembled. Iraq's continuing regional threat, and the arms deals it necessitated, perpetuated spending. The massive build-up in military force, accompanied by continued international economic support for local leaders, shut the window on political opposition and continued a hegemon-backed status quo.
The post-1991 Iraqi threat created an imperative to rely on local authoritarian leaders who were all too willing to comply. In the 1990s, Washington's priorities in the Middle East were first and foremost the containment of Iraq, followed by the Arab-Israeli peace process. Accordingly, local leaders, no matter how authoritarian, continued to receive outside support for maintaining the status quo. Rather than reducing aid and pushing for reform, as occurred in the rest of the world, the United States increased assistance to steadfast Middle Eastern allies. In a dramatic gesture, President Bush successfully urged a wary Congress in 1990 to cancel $7 billion in Egypt's military debt and expected other countries to follow suit. Later, when Jordan was welcomed back into the international fold in the mid-1990s after siding with Iraq during the war, the United States increased assistance from $7.2 million to $200 million, making Jordan one of the world's half-dozen largest recipients of funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development. Although the aid package included an important economic reform component, its primary objective was to reward Jordanian dissociation from Iraq and involvement in the peace process. During the sudden flurry around the 1993 Oslo Accords, aid was used as an inducement for states to come to the bargaining table, not to carry out political reforms.
Inhospitable Soil for Democracy?
These policies stymied the region's political development. Between 1990 and 2000, Freedom House recorded an increase of "free" and "partly free" states from 105 to 145 countries, while "not free" dropped from 62 to 47. But in the Middle East, as the authors of the UN's 2003 Arab Human Development Report noted, "while the general trend [between 1990 and 2000] saw freedom rise worldwide, in most Arab countries it fell, with an apparent decline during the early 1990s."
There was little incentive for local leaders to pursue reform. But even the pressures percolating from the bottom have not been pushing leaders in a more liberal direction. This, too, is a legacy of the Cold War. Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union supported revolutionary Arab nationalists in order to undercut America's more conservative partners like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt (after 1973). In response, the United States tacitly supported the politicization of Islam and those states and domestic groups that rejected "godless communism", even though they did not--and were never expected to--embrace liberal democracy. Religion became a useful tool to combat Soviet expansion.
Saudi Arabia, whose leaders wielded considerable international religious influence because of their ability to speak for Mecca and Medina, was particularly useful to the United States in this regard and was recognized as such going back to President Eisenhower. The country became all the more important as oil wealth provided resources to fund international operations. From Africa to South Asia, the Saudis devoted considerable resources to beat back Soviet influence by both funding local armies and promoting their own view of Islam, one that inoculated future generations from the lure of international communism.
The confluence of U.S.-Saudi anti-communist interests manifested itself most obviously in Afghanistan, where the United States and Saudi Arabia spent no less then $3 billion each, channeling assistance to armed anti-American Islamic fundamentalists. But the shared anti-communism embedded in the U.S.-Saudi partnership, and the proselytizing it spawned, was not limited to Afghanistan; it stretched from Somalia, Sudan and Chad to Pakistan and beyond. Countries where the U.S.-Saudi partnership was strongest are areas where today the Islamist threat is particularly vexing. After September 11, both Somalia and Sudan were considered likely targets in any American operation to eliminate terrorism.
Other American allies, such as Egypt, Tunisia and Israel, supported indigenous Islamic movements in order to counter local nationalist opponents, many of whom were Soviet backed. In turn, the same leaders who underwrote local Islamist groups in the 1970s and 1980s later used their very presence to justify a resistance toward democratization.
In contrast to the support Islamist groups received in America-friendly countries in the Middle East, religious organizations suffered a crueler fate in Soviet-supported countries. The Syrian regime exterminated 20,000 citizens in 1982 for being associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Saddam Hussein's Iraq massacred religious leaders, especially among the Shi'a population. Egypt provides the best example of how Cold War ideological struggles shaped today's politico-religious landscape. While receiving Soviet aid, Gamal Abdel Nasser persecuted the Muslim Brotherhood. American-supported Anwar Sadat, on the other hand, heavily backed the Brotherhood in order to counter local Nasserite opposition.
The politicization of Islam is thus a direct outgrowth of the Middle East's Cold War experience. Given this history, it should come as no surprise that in today's post-Cold War Middle East, the major constituency-based organizations in the Arab world that are best placed to organize politically are Islamist ones.
The Cold War Thaw?
Now that the post-Cold War freeze is thawing, citizens are beginning to take to the streets, and local governments are considering how to manage predictable forthcoming demands. In Lebanon, Walid Jumblatt, the patriarch of the Druze Muslim community in Lebanon and by no means pro-American, told the Washington Post that the "process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. . . . The Berlin Wall has fallen."
Ruling elites now realize that without the Cold War, the Gulf War justification for maintaining the status quo is gone. American backing is no longer assured. Although the 9/11 terrorist attacks certainly introduced reform in the Middle East into Washington's lexicon, such calls became much more determined after the Iraq War. Until then it did not seriously enter onto America's bilateral agenda with states in the region. The war made possible positive political evolution.
The Iraq War removed many of the conventional justifications for continuing with despotic rule, states of emergency, economic centralization and the like. Today, the old regimes are more vulnerable to popular dissent than in any other recent period. Even the conservative Saudi government recognized that it would have to adjust to a new political reality after the impending war. In January 2003, just months before the Iraq War began, Crown Prince Abdullah reportedly discussed plans to use any forthcoming departure of American forces to undertake a series of democratic elections for regional and national assemblies.
There is little doubt that the region is in flux, but change may not break in the direction that many within the Bush Administration anticipate. Today's sudden burst of political activity is not merely a result of the so-called demonstration effect. If it were, then the coupling of Iraqi elections and constitution-writing with U.S. force in the region would provide strong incentive for political and economic liberalization and require little further U.S. involvement. But if, on the other hand, today's changes are largely a result of the upending of the Cold War status quo, then the experience of the 1990s suggests that progress may not be unidirectional, and considerable thought and investment must be devoted to guiding political transitions. After the initial period of post-Cold War-euphoria in eastern Europe and Eurasia, many states experienced ethnic and sectarian violence--among them Yugoslavia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Without strong local institutions to mitigate struggles, politics devolved into bitter strife. In diverse societies where political institutions have for decades been systematically undermined, ethnic and sectarian conflict is likely to emerge if left unattended.
The Cold War's legacy in the Middle East was not the construction of democratic movements like Poland's Solidarity, but rather a politicization of religion that laid the foundations for organizations like Al-Qaeda. As the winds of change blow through the Middle East, they will sweep across this political landscape. The Islamist parties that have been nurtured for decades, many of them virulently anti-American and anti-liberal, will play a more prominent political role than they do elsewhere around the globe.
Going Forward
The invasion of Iraq has removed the economic, political and military scaffolding that bound the region in place for over half a century and allowed savvy local leaders to protect their domestic position. The uncertainty around whether the United States will continue to prop up long-standing allies provides opportunities for opposition groups to press their case. When Washington threatened to withhold potential aid from Egypt in 2003, the social activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim was released from jail, along with his 27 associates. America's quiet support for peaceful demonstrations in the Ukraine inspired many protesters on the streets of Lebanon.
Still, today's political opportunities will not necessarily herald peace, stability and democratization. The lesson of the 1990s is that the path to freedom is strewn with treacherous potholes. Tearing the lid off authoritarian states is not sufficient for solidifying positive trends. Today's Iraq provides the most obvious example. While the overthrow of Saddam allowed a more representative government to assume office, the most zealously anti-Western and anti-liberal forces have muffled (and at times silenced) society's more moderate voices.
Although the experiences of the Middle East and eastern Europe have been profoundly different, there are lessons from the latter that U.S. policymakers can apply to the former. After the end of the Cold War, Washington and its west European allies spent time thinking through how to build and promote local institutions that would bolster democracy and stability. The United States devoted considerable time and resources toward building up local civil society organizations. NATO countries focused on how to depoliticize local militaries and embed them in a larger framework through initiatives like the Partnership for Peace. The United States laid down benchmarks for authoritarian leaders. Elections were an important milestone in the political process, but they were not a goal in and of themselves, nor what received the most assistance.
But while the United States is devoting considerable resources to often very impressive local civic action programs in the Middle East, the programs seem uncoordinated and unrelated to larger goals or transforming politics. The administration's Middle East Partnership Initiative, USAID contributions and Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative operate independently of each other and at times run in competition. The region does not have a credible security architecture into which to embed local forces, and there is no plan to create one. This earnest but haphazard approach toward change will not prevent a descent into chaos if the full weight of the end of the Cold War bears down on the region, as it very well might.
In the words of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the Middle East is "the last remaining region where democracy has not been a force." A long slow process of building domestic political institutions is therefore necessary. Otherwise, today's exciting headlines will quickly recede into yesterday's news.