For those who think that the essence of political analysis is to point the finger of blame, Hamas violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in June provides an object lesson in American responsibility for everything that goes wrong. According to this narrative, the United States (abetted by Israel), provided both the remote cause for this development by pushing Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) into a parliamentary election in 2006 for which he was not prepared, and the proximate cause by then encouraging Fateh to resist coming to terms with the results of the election and, in particular, to refuse to subordinate Fateh-controlled security forces to the duly-elected government.
In Gaza, it is argued (and not just by Hamas apologists), American efforts to finance, arm and train those forces provoked Hamas to launch a preemptive move against what looked like preparations for a coup. In short, American advocacy of democracy and then rejection of its results played a major if not decisive role in bringing Palestinian politics to their present impasse.
Of course, this is not the only example of inconsistency in American policy on Palestinian politics. When Yasser Arafat was president of the Palestinian Authority, the United States demanded an empowered prime minister; when Ismail Haniyeh became prime minister, the United States insisted on an empowered president.
The Palestinian case, moreover, is not the only example in the last year or two of rapidly cooling American ardor for the cause of democratization that had been the centerpiece of the Bush administration s Middle East policy after 2002. Pressure on the regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt to open up more political space was eased following the unexpectedly strong showing of Islamists in Saudi municipal and Egyptian parliamentary elections in 2005. Reservations about the character of the Qaddafi regime in Libya were suppressed once other issues (weapons of mass destruction, terrorism) were resolved to American satisfaction. Support for the embattled government of Fuad Siniora in Lebanon was stepped up in order to confront the threat of Hizballah, even though it is the latter that calls for one man, one vote in order to remove the confessionalist obstacle to proportional Shi ite representation in Lebanese politics. And even in Iraq, the United States continues to support the elected government of Nuri al-Maliki but is clearly unnerved by the Islamist bent of some of his coalition partners and of the major paramilitary forces in both the Shi ite and Sunni communities.
As a result, there is a growing chorus of voices claiming that the United States (and most Europeans) have effectively abandoned commitments to democratization and reverted to traditional preferences for stability in regional and international behavior, regardless of the nature of domestic political systems. Like most such sweeping generalizations this one involves some oversimplification. The Palestinian constitutional reality, for example, is considerably more complex than that admitted by theories of American hypocrisy. At the very least, the basic law does reserve ultimate authority to the president in matters of security; support for the idea that Abu Mazen should retain control of security forces is not a total violation of democratic principle. By way of analogy, French security forces are also ultimately subordinate to the president of the republic, not the prime minister or defense minister. Besides, there is no intrinsic reason why the United States or anyone else should not confront hostile forces just because those forces enjoy popular support.
On the whole, however, there is a large measure of truth to the argument that the United States has retreated on democratization; while the commitment in principle remains, the vigor with which the cause is pushed has clearly diminished in the face of recent experience. The explanation for this is quite straightforward. The Bush administration adopted a stripped-down version of the theory of the democratic peace that overlooked one of its critical qualifications: developed democratic societies may indeed be more inclined to compromise and pursue the peaceful settlement of disputes, including international disputes, but societies in transition are actually more prone to the allure of ideological consistency (i.e., extremism) and the violent promotion of ideological visions and values.
This pattern does not apply only in the case of religiously-inspired values in democratizing societies – it was, after all, the civic religion of post-revolutionary France that so terrified Edmund Burke – and there is no need to resort to theories of Islamic (or Arab) exceptionalism to explain the phenomenon in the contemporary Middle East. At the same time, the phenomenon does seem particularly potent where religion is closely bound up with collective identity. Unless and until this link is weakened in the Middle East as a result of domestic dynamics, transformation agendas will remain stymied by the ease with which liberal/secular can be equated with foreign/alien, and western governments will continue to see only short-term solutions to long-term problems.
Mark A. Helleris director of research at the Institute for National Security Studies, Tel Aviv University. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with bitterlemons-international.org
