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CIAO DATE: 12/03
A Peaceful Approach to Regime Change
On The Issues
April 2003
With the war in Iraq over, the administration is now considering nonmilitary ways of reshaping the rest of the region. Experience gained from relations with communist Poland, terror-sponsoring Libya, and apartheid-ruled South Africa offer valuable lessons for fostering greater freedom in Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.
So—what's next? Already you hear antiwar critics demanding to know who will replace Iraq in the Bush administration's gunsights. These critics fear that the administration is determined to launch an endless sequence of wars to reshape the whole Middle East.
But while reshaping the region is very much on the administration's mind, more wars in the region are not. Instead, the administration's long-range thinkers are planning three different approaches borrowed from the recent past to the area's three most troublesome states, and all three approaches are nonmilitary.
Iran
For Iran, the approach might be compared to the approach the United States and other democratic states took to Poland in the 1980s. In Poland, as in Iran, an economically incompetent authoritarian regime ruled over an increasingly angry population. In Poland, as in Iran, a mass opposition movement rose up against the regime: Solidarity in Poland, the student demo-cratic movement in Iran. Back in the 1980s, the United States and its allies never confronted the Polish communists directly. Instead, they imposed stringent economic sanctions on the regime—and contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for its covert newspapers and radio stations and to support the families of jailed or exiled activists.
Western governments followed the fates of Solidarity's leaders—and demanded answers when any of them were arrested. Publicity deterred the Polish communists from using murder and torture as weapons of repression. And as the regime's economy disintegrated, the Polish communists were compelled first to open negotiations with Solidarity, next to permit Solidarity to compete in semi-free elections, and finally to step aside for a Solidarity government. Fourteen years later, Poland is a democratic state and a staunch NATO ally.
Syria
For Syria, think Libya. In the 1980s, Libya was an audaciously aggressive terrorist regime, just as Syria is now. After a Libyan attack on a West Berlin disco killed three American soldiers and wounded four dozen more, Ronald Reagan ordered a massive bombing attack on Tripoli, the Libyan capital. The 1986 raid was followed by a painful series of covert attacks on the Libyan regime that shattered Muammar Gaddafi's nerve.
Syria has already suffered the first in a coming series of U.S.-administered shocks. In early April, American special forces sabotaged the oil pipeline that runs from Iraq to Syria. Through this pipeline there used to flow up to 200,000 barrels a day of illegally smuggled oil, which Syria resold at a large profit. The income from smuggled oil was one of Syria's most important sources of hard currency. Was, but is no more.
A postwar Syria will be surrounded on three sides by powerful enemies: Turkey, Israel, and a Western-oriented Iraq. Isolated, economically squeezed, vulnerable to terrible retaliation if it misbehaves, under those circumstances, the rulers of the Syrian state may remain the same nasty bunch they are today. But it is a fair bet that they will become much better listeners.
Saudi Arabia
As for Saudi Arabia, it shares more than a set of initials with South Africa. Like Saudi Arabia, apartheid South Africa claimed to be a staunch Western ally. Like Saudi Arabia, South Africa was governed by an ideology that many people in the Western world found repugnant. Like Saudi Arabia, South Africa claimed that greater democracy would plunge the country into chaos.
Through the 1980s, Western states used South Africa's desire to be accepted as a full member of the world community as a lever to force change. For its policy of racial discrimination, South Africa was barred from international sporting competitions, shunned at the United Nations, and picketed by liberal-minded people worldwide.
Religious discrimination plays the same role in Saudi ideology as race discrimination played in South Africa's. In May 2002, two Filipino Christians, Benjamin Diaz and Danilo de Guzman, were sentenced to 150 lashes for the crime of possessing a Bible. (They were finally deported instead.) In January 2002, three Ethiopian Christians reported to their embassy that they had been arrested, suspended in the air, and flogged with a metal cable for taking part in a Christian worship service. The Hyatt Regency hotel in Mecca is the only hotel in the Hyatt chain that will not rent rooms to Jews.
As long as the cold war raged, Western governments did not dare put much pressure on South Africa, which was after all an important source of gold and other valuable resources. As long as Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq, the Saudis enjoyed a similar immunity from international scrutiny. But soon Saddam will be gone—and with him, Saudi immunity.
The war in Iraq is over. The process of peaceful change in the Middle East is only beginning. And what do you bet that the people who now oppose the war on terror will not like peaceful change one whit better?
David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI.
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