The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (15 page)

There were many other likely targets that the administration might have chosen in order to deter another attack on the United States. Both Syria and the Palestinian Authority, formerly the Palestine Liberation Organization, had long, amply documented histories of sponsoring terror dating back to the 1970s; Saudi Arabia, home to fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers, had funded and armed Islamists across the region (as we well knew, since the Saudis had done so often with our approval, if not our active cooperation). All of these regimes might reasonably have expected American reprisal attacks, from which they all would have taken the obvious lesson: Arab rulers who provide funding and support for terrorism are responsible for the actions of their citizens, and hence if Arabs attack American citizens, interests, or allies, Arab states will suffer the consequences.

Saddam drew the short stick. His regime could be toppled, the Americans had throttled his army only a decade before, and he more than any other Arab ruler embodied anti-American causes. Washington’s justification before the world for singling out an Arab country that would have to pay for 9/11 was that Saddam was in possession of weapons of mass destruction, a conviction shared by every intelligence agency in the world, while the United Nations passed numerous Security Council resolutions concerning Iraqi armaments. It was not until six months after the invasion of Iraq—after the Americans failed to find the WMD—that the freedom agenda took pride of place in the administration’s thinking: Iraq would be a forward base for advancing Middle Eastern democracy.
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I have already noted the American habit of seeing the Arab-Israeli crisis as the Middle East’s central issue, which, once solved, would magically settle all the region’s other problems as well. The Bush White House was wise enough to dismiss this idea. But it
nonetheless believed that there was a link tying the region together, meaning that change in one country could have profound effects throughout the region. In their thinking, the road to peace didn’t run through Jerusalem; it went through Baghdad. Democratizing Iraq would touch off a domino effect throughout the Arab states, turning them, one after another, into nascent democracies.

As it happened, there was a chain reaction, but it wasn’t exactly the one the Americans had imagined. The Bush White House had correctly identified the culpability of Arab regimes in cultivating terror and using it as a political tool, but the Americans’ biggest mistake was in believing that the regimes were the only problem. Since these rulers afforded their subjects no other option than violence, Washington would change the game, offering the Arab masses freedom instead of tyranny. The United States would no longer entrust its interests, or security, to allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, whose friendship was rightly in doubt. Instead, America would speak directly to the Arab people, who deserved to govern themselves. The White House knew democracy would prove messy, for a while anyway, but it was convinced that the Arab people would be so busy using their newfound political, social, and economic liberties to have a say in their own self-rule that they would have no time, and no desire, to kill Americans. As 9/11 showed, Arab political culture had only produced despair and exported terror, and so, as President Bush explained in a series of speeches starting in the spring of 2003, the answer was to uproot it and bring democracy to the region. “In an age of global terror and weapons of mass destruction what happens in the Middle East greatly matters to America,” Bush said in a commencement address at the University of South Carolina on May 9, 2003:

In his November 2003 speech at the National Endowment for Democracy, Bush elaborated on his vision of what a democratic Middle East would look like:

The president argued that the West had to take responsibility for its past actions in the region and do better:

In short, a president usually characterized as a swaggering cowboy, a warmonger, was pushing a Middle East policy that could only be described as liberal, if not leftist. Not only should the Americans bring democracy to the Arabs, but, as if taking a page from Edward Said’s
Orientalism
, Bush said that Washington was at fault for not having done so before and ignoring the democratic aspirations of Arabs for sixty years.

Not surprisingly, Arab liberals were energized by Bush’s efforts. The night of the president’s second inaugural speech I was in Syria,
in a middle-class Sunni neighborhood in Homs, a midsize industrial city some two hours north of Damascus, visiting my friend Abdul Rahman, a huge man in his early fifties, well over three hundred pounds, whose emotions come easily. He was sobbing as the American president spoke. “God bless you, Bush,” he said, blowing kisses at the screen. “God bless you, the only man who’s doing something for the Arabs.”

The genuine Arab liberals, as opposed to the regime mouthpieces left out on display for the foreign press and visiting dignitaries, did not draw fine lines between what they believed were American ideals and U.S. policies. When the White House took the side of Arab people against their rulers, that was enough evidence for Arab liberals that American values and policies were aligned just right. “I’m more neocon than the neocons,” said Abdul Rahman. He told me he cried when John and Robert Kennedy were killed, but his American role model now was Paul Wolfowitz, the undersecretary of defense and Bush’s point man for Arab democracy. A few days later, on January 30, 2005, when ten million Iraqis risked their lives to go to the polls, I was sitting in a Beirut restaurant with a Lebanese friend, the political analyst Elie Fawaz. “I cried watching the Iraqis vote,” he said. We lit after-dinner cigars to celebrate in spite of the protestations of Miss Lebanon at a neighboring table. “The courage it took for Iraqis was amazing,” Fawaz said. “This was a great day not just for the Iraqis but for all the Arabs. This is historical. This is going to change a lot of minds about what Arabs can and cannot do.”

It was also a great time to be an American in the region. Some of our countrymen living or working in the Middle East at the time, either driven by their anger at Bush or sympathetic with ostensibly pan-Arab causes, let their emotions shape their analysis and their political inclinations as well, leaving them on the side of dictators, Islamist militants, and regime lackeys. But for others of us there, witnesses to the massive demonstrations in Lebanon, colleagues of Arab bloggers and journalists, or friends of the men and women hopeful
that if the Americans were serious, then things might really change in the region, it was a privilege to be represented by a U.S. government that had taken the side of freedom. It was a time of high optimism, and democracy really did seem to be on the march; the Bush White House was rolling up victories with the elections in Egypt and Iraq, the public demonstrations in Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square, and despots on the defensive from Riyadh to Damascus.

Soon enough, though, it became clear that Arab liberals and their Western supporters had let their hopes get ahead of reality. The Middle East is a part of the world where it is licit and even encouraged to reason with one’s nerves, and the intensity that this brings to Arab politics—an intensity that has no counterpart in our, happily, secure and essentially rational Western societies—is part of the appeal that Arab politics holds out for foreigners. And while this temperament is usually specific to the millenarian and maximalist policies of the parties of resistance and no compromise, it engulfed even the pro-democracy forces, Arabs and foreigners alike, during this period. Swept away by the prospect of real change, we ignored the implausibility of a sustainable democratic revolution in a region where authority is vested in the strong horse.

In retrospect, the January 2006 Palestinian Authority elections that brought Hamas to power were a defining moment. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice explained that the Islamic Resistance Movement’s victory at the polls came as a surprise to her office, a bizarre claim seeing as how the main reason the United States had previously refrained from strong-arming Arab regimes for reform was because over the last three decades Washington had repeatedly been told—by its own analysts, the Israelis, and of course the regimes themselves—that more freedom would empower Islamists.
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The Bush team refused to acknowledge that an Islamist militia with a rejectionist Israel strategy and an obscurantist domestic agenda could really win the affections of an Arab polity. In this instance, the Western media and the Bush White House found themselves on the same side,
explaining that the election results signaled not a vote
for
Hamas’s eliminationist war against its Jewish neighbors but a vote
against
the corruption and incompetence of Fatah. But in time it became clear that the Palestinians knew exactly what they were voting for: armed resistance. How else to explain the fact that just two weeks before Israel’s 2008 siege on Gaza, 250,000 Palestinians, or a little less than 25 percent of Gaza’s total population of 1.4 million, took to the streets to celebrate Hamas’s twenty-first anniversary?
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If the Bush administration refused to come to terms with what Hamas’s victory actually meant, it wasn’t just because it wanted to cover up for its mistakes. It was also because it couldn’t really accept the obvious implication of the election’s result, which was that spending U.S. lives, money, and prestige in pushing democracy on the Arab world might, at the moment, be a fool’s errand. In theory, Arab democracy was the antidote to bin Ladenism and the strong horse principle, offering the Arab masses a share of their own government and obviating the political grievances that presumably gave rise to violence. In practice, the administration’s post-9/11 national security strategy rewarded precisely those whose freedom to operate in any political environment should have been most severely curtailed—the Islamists, or anyone who sounded even faintly like Osama bin Laden.

The administration hoped that the democratic process would moderate the Islamists by forcing them to maneuver in the messy realm of give-and-take politics. Yet there is little evidence that radicals are made moderate by having to solicit votes and govern. History shows that the reverse is true—radicals radicalize politics. For instance, Hitler did not become more moderate when he took over the reins of a parliamentary government; he liquidated opponents and onetime allies, turned Germany into a totalitarian state, and set it on a course for war. And at least the government Hitler took over, the Weimar Republic, was a consensual political system to begin with, whereas the Arab states that the United States pressured into
elections, with the exception of Lebanon, had never known anything but authoritarian rule. So, what was going to compel the Islamists to become moderate in a climate of extremism and eliminationism—that is, the normal weather of Arab politics? Where did the Americans get the idea that Islamists could be made democrats?