THE COOKIE PUSHERS TRY TO SAVE THEIR PALS:

Democracy Domino Theory 'Not Credible': A State Department report disputes Bush's claim that ousting Hussein will spur reforms in the Mideast, intelligence officials say. (Greg Miller, March 14, 2003, LA Times)

A classified State Department report expresses doubt that installing a new regime in Iraq will foster the spread of democracy in the Middle East, a claim President Bush has made in trying to build support for a war, according to intelligence officials familiar with the document.

The report exposes significant divisions within the Bush administration over the so-called democratic domino theory, one of the arguments that underpins the case for invading Iraq.

The report, which has been distributed to a small group of top government officials but not publicly disclosed, says that daunting economic and social problems are likely to undermine basic stability in the region for years, let alone prospects for democratic reform.

Even if some version of democracy took root - an event the report casts as unlikely - anti-American sentiment is so pervasive that elections in the short term could lead to the rise of Islamic-controlled governments hostile to the United States.

"Liberal democracy would be difficult to achieve," says one passage of the report, according to an intelligence official who agreed to read portions of it to The Times.

"Electoral democracy, were it to emerge, could well be subject to exploitation by anti-American elements."

The thrust of the document, the source said, "is that this idea that you're going to transform the Middle East and fundamentally alter its trajectory is not credible."

Even the document's title appears to dismiss the administration argument. The report is labeled "Iraq, the Middle East and Change: No Dominoes."

The report was produced by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the in-house analytical arm. [...]

The report concludes that "political changes conducive to broader and enduring stability throughout the region will be difficult to achieve for a very long time."

Middle East experts said there are other factors working against democratic reform, including a culture that values community and to some extent conformity over individual rights.

"I don't accept the view that the fall of Saddam Hussein is going to prompt quick or even discernible movement toward democratization of the Arab states," said Philip C. Wilcox, director of the Foundation for Middle East Peace and a former top State Department official. "Those countries are held back not by the presence of vicious authoritarian regimes in Baghdad but by a lot of other reasons."

Bush has responded to such assessments by assailing the "soft bigotry of low expectations."

We remain agnostic on the question of whether the Middle East can be successfully democratized before there is an epochal reformation of Islam to allow for the secularization of government. However, a report from the notoriously Arabist State Department has zero credibility. It is the nature of the striped-pants set to favor totalitarian Arab regimes and the stability they supposedly provide over even the interests of America and even more so over democratic Israel. The report may well be right, it may not be possible to transform the Middle East peacefully. But if this is correct--Palestine offers the test case--it is going to have to be transformed militarily--either by American invasion or by pro-Western dictatorships like those that transformed Turkey and Iran. The issue that we are now deciding is whether the future of the region will look more like a Reformation or the Crusades and that decision lies very much in the hands of the Arabs themselves.

MORE:

-ESSAY: Tales from the Bazaar: As individuals, few American diplomats have been as anonymous as the members of the group known as Arabists. And yet as a group, no cadre of diplomats has aroused more suspicion than the Arab experts have. Arabists are frequently accused of romanticism, of having "gone native"--charges brought with a special vehemence as a result of the recent Gulf War and the events leading up to it. Who are the Arabists? Where did they come from? Do they deserve our confidence? (Robert D. Kaplan, August 1992, Atlantic Monthly)

-ESSAY: Democracy by America (Daniel Drezner, 3/12/02, New Republic)

-It's Democracy, Like It or Not (TODD S. PURDUM, March 9, 2003, NY Times)

For more than two centuries, no nation on earth has preached the healing powers of democracy more consistently than the United States. H. L. Mencken summed up the native faith as "the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

Now President Bush pledges that by ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein, "free people will set the course of history, and free people will keep the peace of the world." [...]

Yet for most of the 19th century, the United States bought or won territory from foreign powers in war, avoided alliances and stood alone. And even though the United States helped found the United Nations and the post-World War II international security framework, it has faced varying degrees of anti-Americanism and charges of hypocrisy.

"It's something much deeper now," said James Chace, a professor of government and public law at Bard College. "What's happening is that the manner in which this administration has largely talked about the world, the kind of general arrogance and bullying tone, just reinforces the sense that we are now seen, and I think rightly, as an imperial power."

"The question," he added, "is whether it will be seen as relatively benevolent, or not."

Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the University of Maryland, said: "It is not about not wanting democracy. I think that we underestimate the extent to which other priorities overtake democracy in our foreign policy."

In a famous speech in 1982 outlining his foreign policy to the British Parliament, Ronald Reagan declared, "The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the infrastructures of democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means."

But President Reagan often settled for less. The first President Bush protested when a military coup overthrew the democratically elected leader of Haiti, the Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, but was far less exercised around the same time when the Algerian Army canceled the second round of elections that seemed certain to put an Islamic fundamentalist regime in power.

"The romance of democracy is that somehow the results will come out the way you want, but everything we know about democracy is that the result comes out the way the people want," said John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University. "It's a very creaky instrument."

Robert D. Kaplan, a foreign policy expert and author who has twice briefed President Bush, contends that there is no double standard to American ambitions abroad. He argues that the United States should promote democratic change where it can, but not do so irresponsibly in places unready to handle it, where the result could unleash anti-democratic forces.

"Anyone can hold an election," he said, "but building real democratic institutions - police, judges, a constitution - is much harder." He added: "There will always be places where the alternatives are bad, and without hypocrisy you will improve human rights dramatically by going for a more liberal-minded dictator over a Stalinist one. If Saddam were to be replaced tomorrow by an Iraqi general along the lines of Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan, real changes would occur."

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 15, 2003 6:21 AM