WHAT'S THE PROBLEM WITH SELF-GOVERNANCE?:

False Accounting: Hillary Clinton told Arab leaders to clean house last week, encouraging an age of accountability. But until the Arab world has democratic institutions and an engaged populace, her words may be meaningless. (Lee Smith, Jan 19, 2011, Tablet)

If it weren’t for the historic events in Tunisia—where for the first time in Arab history a people rose up to send their ruler packing—people in Rabat, Morocco, where I’m traveling for the next week, and throughout the region would still be talking about Clinton’s speech. What made it surprisingly welcome is that, up until last Thursday, the Obama Administration had been putting as much distance as possible between itself and President George W. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda.” It wasn’t clear whether President Barack Obama believes that democracy promotion is likely to destabilize the repressive and volatile political systems of the Arab world—and that the survival of those regimes would be in America’s best interest—or if he was just following an anything-but-Bush handbook. [...]

In Doha, Clinton argued that “[i]t is important to demonstrate that there is rule of law, good governance, and respect for contracts to create an investment climate that attracts businesses and keeps them there.” The problem here is that this isn’t necessarily true—a fact borne out by Ben Ali’s Tunisia. The regime was corrupt to the core—Ben Ali’s wife’s family had a hand in virtually every business venture in the country—but the country’s pro-business climate and liberalized economy won praises from all corners, including the IMF. Good governance then had nothing to do with building Tunisia’s economy or creating the country’s middle class, for it was all crafted by the heavy hand of a dictator.

“If leaders don’t offer a positive vision and give young people meaningful ways to contribute, others will fill the vacuum”—namely, “extremist elements, terrorist groups and others who would prey off desperation and poverty,” Clinton warned her audience in Doha. Alas, this isn’t true either. Visitors to the police state that Ben Ali ruled admired the country’s relatively open atmosphere—open, except for political dissent—but its secularism, educational system, and the relative freedom of women, had very little to do with a positive vision. Rather, it was all engendered by the single-minded obsession of a tyrant who perceived, perhaps rightly, that the country’s Islamist movement constituted his most serious and best-organized opposition. It is the fact that Ben Ali thoroughly repressed the Islamists and eradicated any evidence of their potent symbols and discourse that gave Tunisia’s its left-bank flair.

What is more depressing is that while we believe poverty, hopelessness, and despair may pave the way for extremist elements and terrorist groups, we know that democracy has empowered them where repression sidelines them. Even avid Bush partisans cannot ignore the fact that the gospel of democratization propagated by Bush and his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, during the president’s second term helped bring Hamas to power in Gaza and strengthened Hezbollah’s hand in Lebanon.

Ignore? The emerging independence of the Palestinians and the Shi'a is the point of the exercise.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 20, 2011 7:09 AM