The recent American election has brought an unhappy convergence of left and right, a bizarre meeting of the minds in which liberals who despise the American mission in Iraq and conservatives who value stability over democracy agree: President George W. Bush’s freedom agenda must end.
Iraq, unsurprisingly, is at the heart of misgivings about advancing democracy in the Middle East. More than 2,800 American servicemen and women have died, yet victory seems as elusive as ever. Many suggest without embarrassment that both Iraqis and Americans were better off under Saddam Hussein. Leading Democrats, including the incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, her candidate for House Majority Leader John Murtha, the incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and much of the new Senate leadership insist that redeployment from Iraq must come within four to six months.
It will be nigh on impossible for the Democratic Congress to force the president to withdraw US troops from Iraq. Mechanically, Congress has limited power to compel any commander-in-chief in time of war – legislation denying funds to the war effort would likely face veto if, against all odds, it gained passage through both houses of Congress.
Increasingly, however, it appears that Reid and Pelosi will not need to force the president into a hasty retreat. In the wake of the Republican rout in midterm elections, the president signaled that his commitment to victory in Iraq might be in question. Within a week, Bush replaced his secretary of defense with a veteran of his father’s ‘realist’ administration and welcomed the members of the Iraq Study Group – a commission dominated by opponents to the war and to Bush’s freedom agenda – into the Oval Office, reversing an earlier decision to shun the group.
The Iraq Study Group, led by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Representative Lee Hamilton, has been the focus of intense attention among tea leaf readers in the US and abroad. Both Baker and Hamilton have made clear that they believe Washington should define down its goals in Iraq, seeking ‘representative government, not necessarily democracy’ as Baker told a television interviewer. In addition, both have loudly proclaimed the need for the United States to reach out to dictators in Syria and Iran, a move Bush has heretofore resisted.
Other straws in the wind bode ill for the hundreds of millions in the Middle East who live under ‘stable’ autocrats and tyrants. The State Department, tasked to implement the president’s commitment to ‘lead freedom’s advance,’ has balked at the job. Political prisoners languish in prison from Libya to Egypt to Syria with nary a word of protest from either the secretary of state or America’s emissaries in the region. On a recent trip to Cairo, the once outspoken Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice refused to challenge publicly the Mubarak regime on its declining human rights record, and recently referred to the governments of Egypt and Saudi Arabia as ‘moderate states [key to supporting] moderate voices’ in the region.
Little wonder then that those in the region so heartened by the president’s repeated commitments to stand with individuals over despots have begun to lose hope. They see all too clearly that the liberals who were once their tribunes and the conservatives who had so recently championed their cause are losing interest. Democracy is, after all, a messy thing. Institutions are hard to build, curricula are difficult to reform, and elections so often bolster the most organized in the Muslim political world: the Islamists. For much of the 20th century, American diplomats embraced the one-stop shopping offered by the Middle East’s dictators. In the face of the hapless Iraqi government, rampant corruption and violent sectarianism, some suggest the strongman is the right man.
A return to the status quo ante, however, does not solve the challenge facing the US. The heart and soul of Islamic extremism is not in Iraq, but in the lack of freedom in the Middle East – people without choices turn to the only options available to them. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, jihadists worked in mosques, in schools and at the grass roots to persuade Muslims that they were the answer to the region’s dictators. A resurgence of those dictators will mean even greater strength to Al-Qaeda and its ilk.
After 9/11 many Americans, the president among them, awakened to the reality that the only antidote to the poison of Islamic extremism was freedom. In the early days after the attack, the US worked to empower Arab and Iranian democrats to fight the extremists. Once liberated, those forces cannot be eliminated. And sooner or later, the US will again turn to them as the only salvation against our shared enemy.
The president may no longer be persuaded, and the leaders of the Democratic Party may be too consumed by antipathy toward even the relics of the Bush agenda, but George W. Bush’s 2003 clarion call for liberty continues to resonate for a simple reason: it is true. ‘Sixty years of western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe – because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.’
Danielle Pletka is vice president of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC. This commentary first appeared at bitterlemons-international.org, an online newsletter.
