SOME RACES JUST CAN'T GOVERN THEMSELVES:

GOING NOWHERE: In Mubarak’s Egypt, democracy is an idea whose time has not yet come (DAVID REMNICK, 2004-07-12 and 19, The New Yorker)

Last November, President Bush delivered a speech at the National Endowment for Democracy, in Washington, spelling out the loftiest of his rationales for the war in Iraq—a determination to remake the political world from North Africa to the Arabian peninsula. It was a radical conservative’s most radical address. The end of the twentieth century, Bush said, had marked “the swiftest advance of freedom in the twenty-five-hundred-year story of democracy,” an advance that began with Portugal, Spain, and Greece more than thirty years ago, spread to South Korea and Taiwan, and then, finally, to South Africa and the entire Soviet imperium. By the President’s accounting, there were forty democracies in the world in the early nineteen-seventies and a hundred and twenty by 2000. Never mind the reassertion of authoritarian regimes in Central Asia and elsewhere. For Bush, one region in particular remained stubbornly unfree. “Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty?” he asked. The United States, he declared, had “adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East” that would depend on American “persistence and energy and idealism” but also on the Arab countries—not least, the most populous, powerful, and influential country in the region. “The great and proud nation of Egypt has shown the way toward peace in the Middle East,” Bush said, “and now should show the way toward democracy in the Middle East.”

The logic of that rhetorical instruction was not lost on the Egyptians: just as Anwar Sadat, a quarter-century earlier, had flown to Jerusalem to make peace with Israel, Hosni Mubarak, an unchallenged four-term President, a modern pharaoh, should take the equally bold step of creating a constitutional democracy, even at the risk of surrendering power. Egypt is historically central, a civilization of more than seven thousand years’ standing, and, unlike the sectarian societies of Syria and Iraq or the arriviste dynastic oil depots of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, it is a true nation-state, the center of nearly all currents, intellectual and ideological, in the Arab world. In Bush’s own mind, at least, he was encouraging a revolution from above, an Arabian perestroika. And the revolution, he made plain, ought to begin in Cairo.

There has, of course, been no such revolution in Cairo, and no sign of one. Part of the collateral damage of the Bush Administration’s prosecution of the war in Iraq is the erosion of American prestige and influence all over the world. Rather than take the democratizing cue from Bush, Mubarak’s regime has offered itself as an example to the United States: Spare us the pretense of an open society, its leaders imply. Your greatest fear, like ours, is terrorism, and the only way to defeat such an enemy is by crushing it.

So Mr. Remnick's answer to the question--“Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty?”--is: yes.

Think for just a moment what this answer requires you to believe, that the people of Egypt, for instance, will be satisfied with a per capita GDP of $3,900. Because that's what the long needless lesson of the 20th century teaches: you can have totalitarianism or economic development, but not both. Mr. Remnick actually knew that when he covered the Soviet Union--was, in fact, one of the few mainstream correspondents who seemed to grasp it. But now just as folks then claimed the Slavs were incapable of liberty and just as folks previously claimed "coloreds" or women or Orientals or whoever weren't capable of it, he's telling us that Muslims aren't capable of it. This is an essay he'll be deeply, and deservedly, ashamed of twenty years from now.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 6, 2004 1:36 PM