Islamists and the grave Bell.

AuthorGause, F. Gregory, III
PositionEssay

Americans have short memories, at least when it comes to the Middle East. Once again pundits and opinion makers are jumping aboard the democracy-promotion train. There seems to be a renewed longing for the heady days of the Bush administration when the Washington conventional wisdom held that democracy promotion was the best antidote to regional anti-Americanism and terrorism. Two Middle East elections in June 2009--in Lebanon and Iran--were enough to bring the democracy mavens back to their laptops. When the expected victory of Hezbollah and its Christian ally, the Free Patriotic Movement of Michel Aoun, did not materialize in the Lebanese parliamentary election, it was hailed as the dawn of a new day. That was a Middle East election with a good outcome for America. And then there was the Iranian debacle: an election that seemed to expose both the fading electoral strength of anti-American Islamists (who apparently felt they had to steal the election to stay in power) and the growing street-level support for "moderates" and "secularists."

The enthusiasm with which these events, before they had even run their course, animated very sensible American commentators on foreign policy was remarkable. The scenes of brave Iranians standing up to a regime that respected neither their votes nor their intelligence were certainly inspiring. However, it was less inspiring to see how quickly those scenes were extrapolated to become a new data point in a supposed trend of non-Islamist and pro-American democratic movements in the Middle East. One election might be an aberration, but two elections cannot be anything but a trend. Or so one might think from reading the op-ed pages of America's leading newspapers.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman unsurprisingly saw new social-networking technologies as the driving force behind the events in Iran. In the recent past, it was only the Islamists who could resist the authoritarian state in the Middle East, because they had mosques to use as the focal point for political organization. But now, Iran gives evidence that:

the more secular forces of moderation have used technologies like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, blogging and text-messaging as their virtual mosque, as the place they can now gather, mobilize, plan, inform and energize their supporters, outside the grip of the state. The flatter world will benefit the secular moderates. Friedman saw in Lebanon, Iraq and even the Palestinian territories, as well as Iran, evidence that "centrist majorities, who detest these Islamist groups" are finally mobilizing against them.

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At the Washington Post, the normally more cautious David Ignatius was not as technology driven as Friedman, but also saw a similar trend:

Muslim parties and their allies have suffered election setbacks over the past several years in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco and Pakistan.... The reasons for these political setbacks vary from place to place.... But there's a common theme: "The Muslim parties have failed to convince the public that they have any more answers than anyone else." [quoting Marina Ottaway of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace]

Former-American Enterprise Institute scholar Joshua Muravchik, again in the Washington Post, took this purported tide shift against Islamist groups and parties in electoral politics and extrapolated it out to proclaim the "death of radical Islam." He saw the failure of al-Qaeda in Iraq as part and parcel of this shift, both evidence of Islamists' decreasing relevance and a cause of their decline.

If the Islamists are in fact losing ground and "secular moderates" are on the rise, then the neoconservative thesis that the promotion of Middle East democracy will advance American interests would be vindicated. On cue, prominent neoconservatives wasted no time in unfurling their tattered banner of Middle East democracy promotion on the intellectual battlefield. Elliott Abrams, who managed Middle Eastern and democracy-promotion portfolios on the George W. Bush National Security Council, argued in the New York Times that free elections, like the one in Lebanon, lead to results favorable to the United States. Corrupt and facade elections, like the one in Iran, do not. Therefore, Abrams concluded, "what the United States should be promoting is not elections, but free elections." Fellow neoconservatives Robert Kagan and Michael Gerson sang from the same hymnal in the Washington Post. The Iraq debacle, unfortunately, has not extinguished their fervor for meddling in the domestic politics of Middle Eastern countries.

On the opposite side of the ideological spectrum, James Traub, the New York Times Magazine contributor and author of The Freedom Agenda: Why America Must Spread Democracy (Just Not the Way George Bush Did), made a somewhat similar point just before the Iranian election on Foreign Policy online, but with a very different logic. He argued that President Obama's global popularity has opened up new possibilities for the United States to encourage more secular, pro-American political movements to good effect. He presented a questionable causal argument based on the sequence of recent events:

News accounts assert that the president's Cairo speech helped tilt the Lebanese election to the secular March 14 coalition.... The Lebanese outcome, in turn, as well as reverberations from the speech, may give a boost to challengers in Friday's election in Tehran. The idea of democracy as an answer, if not the answer, to America's problems in the Middle East is premised on this basic idea that Islamist political groups are declining in popularity. The problems that Islamists in power present for American policy are clear: they have not resigned themselves to accepting Israel as a permanent part of the Middle Eastern map and thus do not support the Arab-Israeli peace process; they reject the extent of American influence in the region as a whole and would not cooperate with either American defense plans or the "war on terrorism"; they most certainly would not be willing to host American military facilities. Our experience with the Islamist revolutionaries who took power in Iran in 1979 has not, to put it mildly, been encouraging. It was the victory of Islamists in the Iraqi and Palestinian elections that took the wind out of the sails of the Bush administration's democracy-promotion plans in 2005-06. So a revival of democracy promotion in Washington requires the underlying assumption that Islamists will not win Middle Eastern elections.

And the broad agreement about this among the punditocracy, across ideological lines, should be the first warning that their arguments require a very critical review.

Iran and Lebanon simply do not serve as indicators of a larger regional democracy shift. Islamic parties have continued to do remarkably well in elections across the Middle East over the last few years. And, where we have seen setbacks, trends cannot be extrapolated. Most certainly, any waning of the fortunes of violent groups like al-Qaeda does not speak to the outcomes of electoral processes as a whole.

Contrary to the punditocracy's analysis, the June 2009 Lebanese parliamentary election was far from an anti-Islamist referendum. It was more an exercise in sectarian community mobilization, and the key swing voters were Christians. As Lebanon is the only Middle Eastern...

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