LIBERTY FOR STRANGERS: AMERICAN POWER AND THE PREDICAMENT OF THE ARABS
AJAMI, FOUAD
3 2 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R A P R I L 2 0 0 7 N THE SCHEME ofAmericandiplomatichistoryinthe Arab-Islamic lands, the advocacy of freedom in those domains is of recent vintage. If a...
...But there were men with guns, and Iranian money, and an ability to frighten others into submission...
...But here, too, there could be felt the breeze of freedom...
...We had given protection to the Cedar Revolution, and soon all the fratricide at the heart of Lebanon's tormented history came to the fore...
...American power would claim Lebanon's escape from Syrian captivity as one of the principal achievements ofitscampaignforliberty...
...The place invited American intervention--andbalkedatitatthesametime.Pharaoh heldouttothePaxAmericanathefamiliarbargain:He wouldkeepthepeace(andtheterrorists)athome,but his ways would have to be accepted...
...That order's power is hollow, andtheAmericansthemselves,hesaid,hademptiedit of its power...
...A shrewd merchant in Kuwait who knows the ways of the region saw sure failure stalking this new attempt to go back to the autocracies...
...The war, and its sacrifices, had to be given a new rationale, and the emphasis on liberty would come to animate American diplomacy...
...Liberalism in its American variety had historicallybeenbasedonthebeliefinLiberty'sabilityto skip borders...
...Hecarriedwithhimanoldbranchfortheoldorder:In hisandhisStudyGroup'sreport,therewouldbelittleif anytalkoffreedomandreform.Thiswasthe"Rolodex diplomacy" of years past...
...Wilson's secretary of state, Robert Lansing, thought it calamitousthatWilsonhadtakenupsodangerousa course...
...For a self-professed liberal internationalist, this was remarkable language and imagery...
...We had bet on freedom, buttheArabsdidnothaveitintheirDNA;wehad come from afar only to discover that those who would wager on the reform of the Arab condition would be plowing the sea...
...There wasn't much that the old Arab order of statescould--orwould--doforAmericainIraq.Indeed, the very order America had midwifed in Iraq was anathematotheArabregimes.Whetherwewilleditornot, wewereempoweringtheShia(andtheKurds).Forwell over a millennium, Arab Shi'ism had not governed...
...They had their history...
...True, Arabic letters and poetry had owed a great deal totheIraqis.Butitwouldbefairtosay--thoughIraqis would contest this--that Baghdad lagged behind Beirut,Cairo,andDamascus,intheageofthe"Arabawakening...
...Americanpowerwasatalossastowhattodowith Mubarak...
...In Egypt's prisonsandtorturechambers,itcouldbesaid,theseeds hadbeensownfortroubletocome.Ameanderingroad led from the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat, in October of 1981, to the Islamist terrors a generation later...
...Joseph BidenofDelaware,inatelevisioninterviewofDecember 10,2006,ontheABCnewsprogramThisWeek,putthe matterinstarkterms.HehadseenPresidentBush,he said, and the President had reiterated his belief in the universal appeal of liberty...
...It was Iraq, of course, that would determine the fateofthisnewAmericanpushintoArablands.Ithad been there where the statues were toppled, where a constitutional document was drafted, and where the Pax Americana had proclaimed its new faith in the abilityoftheArabstobreakwithtyranny.Anditwould be there, three or four years into this undertaking, where the scales would tip against the cause of freedom.ItwouldbefairtoconcedethatIraqin2006was not the envy of Arabs in other lands, or a source of worry to the Arab rulers that their populations would want for themselves what was playing out in Iraq...
...There was Syria, temporarily chastened but gaining in confidence as its rulers realized that they had been spared...
...There is in those lands a keen eye for the seriousness, and the will, of outsidepowers.Thegreaterconfidenceshownbytheenemies of liberty three or four years later derived from a reading by these forces that the tide had turned withinAmericaitself...
...Iraq had always been seen by other Arabs as the "wildest" and most checkered of Arab lands--a frontier country at the intersection of Arabia, Turkey, and Iran, a country with a tradition of political violence...
...In the 19th century, it was the reform-minded dynasty of Muhammad Ali that distinguished Egypt from the Ottoman Empire and began to transform it into the region'sfirstmodernnation.Intheearly20thcentury, itwastheforward-lookingWafdPartythatroseinthe aftermath of the First World War and established Cairo as the heart of the `Arab Awakening.' And just threedecadesago,itwasAnwarSadatwhoshowedthe wayforwardintheentireMiddleEast...
...What exactly was the difference between the maskedmenofHamasandthemaskedmenofFatah's Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade...
...There crept into the commentaries a harshness, a dismissiveness, about Iraq and Iraqis in particular: Iraq's people were now warringtribes,cruelandvindictive,andgiventotimeless feuds...
...It was fear of American power that had brought downtheedificeofSyrianhegemonyinLebanon.The Pax Americana hadn't always been enamored of Lebanon.ItsWesternismanditsChristiancommunities notwithstanding, American diplomacy over the precedingquarter-centuryhadallbutconsignedLebanontoSyrianrule.TheLebanesewerewarringsects, and America was understandably reluctant to be drawn into their affairs...
...B YF O U A DA J A M I paratus on one side, and a dark, incoherent Islamist movement on the other...
...We know what became of the Wilsonian program at home: A crusading president was rebuffed and frustrated by Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and William Borah of Idaho and a SenatethatwouldturnbackWilson'sprogram.Wilson hadnotbeenamatchforthedetractorsandskepticsat home...
...Arafat's successor, MahmoudAbbas,wasafairlydecentman;hehadpromised order, he had tried to pull Palestinian society back from the violence that had been raging in it since the "Second Intifada" that had erupted in the year 2000...
...It will raise hopes which can never be realized...
...And theywere,totheSunnirulers,aperfectsolution.Here was an opportunity to spook the foreign power, to enlistitindefenseofsectarianprivilegesandphobias...
...This detour into history, this open appeal to the country's better nature, played out against the background of a dismal political standoff...
...Butwecanbesurethatwhenthedustofthatstrikesettled, the Arabs would be out and about maligning America's imperial ways...
...The Arab critics of this Iraqi project-self-styled secular intellectuals in Amman, Cairo, and in the Arab diaspora communities in North America andWesternEurope--coulddismissthisIraqiexperiment as a cover for American hegemony...
...He had bet on freedom in Iraq and in Lebanon,andhehadputthePalestiniansbeforeahistoricchoice:Theycouldhavestatehoodorthewaysof terror and violence...
...At its core, the Bush program rested on a linkage between their freedom out there in Islamic lands, and our security here at home...
...His grandfather had been one of the five benefactors who incorporated the college...
...By late 2006, these three Arab realmswerereeling.InIraq,thebloodshedhadallbut obliterated the political life and the elections...
...In the sweep of modern history, the fortunes of liberty were in no smallmeasuredependentonthestructureofpowerin theorderofstates.Thewillofthedominantpower--or powers--intheworldmatteredgreatlytothefortunes of democratic governance and to its appeal...
...But one offers itself as a precursor for Bush's diplomacyoffreedom:thenoblebutdoomed struggle on the part of Woodrow Wilson to sell his country on his peace program in the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles...
...After Kabul, we had swept intoBaghdad,becauseKabulhadnotsufficed.Wewere guided, subliminally, by a correct reading of that arc of troubleintheArab-Islamicworld.ItwasfromtheArab worldthatourtroubleshadcome.Butwiththemounting costs of the Iraq war, more and more Americans came to see this linkage between American security and the repair of the Arab world as imposing intolerable burdens...
...If and when these pricestumble,thefragilityoftheedificeofArabpower willbethereforalltosee...
...And there was a long history of Shia disinheritance, and that history would be skillfully used by Hezbollah leaders who had risen from the lowest rungs of a class-ridden society and were determined to fight for their newly acquired power...
...Throughout its history, Egypt has always led this region through moments of greatest decision...
...Joseph Biden was simply giving voice to this"knowingness...
...In Iraq, a virulent insurgency warred with the new politics, but there can be no denying the hopes stirred by twonationalelectionsandaconstitutionalreferendum held in that country...
...When I gave utterance to those words"--that all nations hadtherighttoself-determination--"Isaidthem withouttheknowledgethatnationalitiesexisted, which are coming to us day after day...
...WE CAN'T KNOW WITH confidence what becomes of this campaign to make the ArabMuslim world less deadly to itself and to others...
...This was the inheritance that Yasser Arafat left behind...
...deathandruinontoAmericansoilon9/11,wehadbattled a primitive Sunni movement in Afghanistan, and the Sunni Arabs had taken up arms against America's new order in Iraq...
...This new history was of course playing out under Americantutelage.ItwasGeorgeW.Bush,andthewar he waged, that had given birth to this new political experiment...
...If Bush had come to the Middle East unprepared, sohadWilson.PointTwelve--thewholeinterestinthe former domains of the Ottoman empire--was owed to Wilson's close friendship with a Princeton classmate, Cleveland Hoadley Dodge, a devout Presbyterian, an industrialist, and a philanthropist deeply involved in the affairs of the Near East, and in the flagship of the Presbyterianmissionaries,theSyrianProtestantCollege(laterrenamedtheAmericanUniversityofBeirut...
...If a date is to be giventhebirthofthisdiplomacy,itwouldhavetobe President George W. Bush's speech to the National Endowment for Democracy on November 6, 2003...
...ThegospelpreachedbyWilsonwasthe one great message of reform that would continue to resonate in Arab lands...
...To be sure, the Arabs themselves were feeding Iraq's flames,butwhatmatteredwastheconfidenceofIraq's neighborsthatlibertyhadbeenshowntobeareckless undertaking...
...ButgenerationsofArabsandMuslimsalwaysretained the memory that point twelve of Wilson's Fourteen Points urged that the former subjects of the Ottoman Empire be given "an opportunity for an autonomous development...
...The Secretary of State traveledtohisdomainwithanappealtoEgypt'sliberal tradition, a call on the country to remember a rich andvibrantpoliticallifebeforethetimeofthemilitary autocracy.InawidelycoveredspeechattheAmerican University of Cairo, on June 20, 2005, Secretary Rice calledupthebestofEgypt'snationalmemory,itspride in its struggle for social and cultural emancipation...
...An "anti-imperialist" ideology, easy and smug, the diet of politicalmenwithoutpower,wouldsealtheirfate...
...We are all concerned for the futureofEgypt'sreformswhenpeacefulsupportersof democracy--men and women--are not free from vio-lence.Thedaymustcomewhentheruleoflawreplacesemergencydecrees--andwhentheindependentjudiciaryreplacesarbitraryjustice...
...American liberalism now left it to a conservative American president to uphold liberty's appeal and the possibilityofitsspreadinArab-Islamiclands...
...Americans are strangers in that world...
...The rulers of the region are nervous, the people of the region are envious," the man said before the new order in Iraq would descendintoawarforitsverylife...
...In 2006, he received the Bradley Prize for Outstanding Achievement and the National Medal of the Humanities...
...It was the smart and safe thing now to say that these Arab-Islamic domains were lands of despotism...
...Fouad AjamiteachesatTheJohnsHopkinsUniversity School of Advanced International Studies...
...TheSecretaryofStatehadbroughtitoutintothe open.Anuneasybattlelayahead,theAmericans couldneverarriveattherightpolicytowardthis mostpopulousofArabstates.Thecunningmilitary autocrat knew the game: He stalled, he fell back on Egypt's instinctive suspicion of outside domination...
...The foreign power that had come with this new gospel of freedom could not force its own civic ideas on a stubborn Arab world, uphold these ideas in the face of a dark SunniShiafeudthatmadeitsre-appearanceintheregion.(It hadbeenfoughtoutinthe1980s,inthetimeofthecivil war between Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's millennial revolution and the Sunni order of states in the Arab world...
...He had bullied the middle class, brazenly imprisoned the few secular intellectualswhohaddaredquestionhismonopolyoverthelife of the land...
...But we judge quickertoday,anditwaseasytodespairofLebanon,to writeitoffasautopiancampaigngoneawry...
...Without a long view of history, without an explanation that would situate the Iraq war in the broader struggle with Islamic terror, Iraq had turned into a great American disappointment...
...In a democratic system, the majority will have its way...
...More problematic still, America would remainoddlysusceptibletotherepresentationsmade to it by the Sunni Arab regimes about the menace of radical Shi'ism...
...Those Sunni Arabregimeshadbeenthesourceofourmalady:Itwas their disaffected children, pitiless younger warriors, whohadbroughtdeathanddestructionontoAmerican soil on 9/11 and set America on the road to Kabul and Baghdad.Theywerenowtobeforgiven...
...Dodge himself was to proveasteadysupporterofWilson--hewasthelargest contributor to his two presidential campaigns...
...For there is today a kind of Arab absence from history, and the lands of the Arab world seem like a battleground between Pax Americana and Iran...
...This entire order rests on $60 a barrel of oil...
...If these two clerics were the harvest of democracy in IraqandLebanon,theautocraticorderwouldhavean easier time returning to its old accommodation with thePaxAmericana...
...President Bush had not bet heavily on the Palestinians--he had been wise to correct for Bill Clinton's obsession with the fight between Israel and the Palestinians...
...Therewasfervorinthatspeech,andbelief.Indeed, there was a startling mea culpa for decades of American diplomacy: "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in theMiddle East did nothing to make us safe--because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty...
...Indeed, the rulers in these two pivotal realms were being put on notice that the traditional deference to theirwaysnolongerobtains...
...Faced with a choice between Fatah's reign of plunder and corruption and Hamas's politicsofzeal,thereligiousdiehardsofHamashadprevailed...
...In his second Inaugural Address, President Bush would proclaim thenewdoctrineyetagain:"Allwholiveintyrannyand hopelessness can know: The United States will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors...
...For them, it was enough that the diplomacy of freedom had been GeorgeW.Bush'sprogram,andtheywantednothingto dowithit...
...We were to "engage" the rogues(SyriaandIran)andtodefertothechameleons at the helm of the Sunni Arab regimes...
...EGYPT UNDER ITS AGING AUTOCRAT,HosniMubarak, presented a different challenge...
...YoungIslamistshadcomeintotheirown,butthemilitaryregimehadthwartedtheirschemes.Zawahirihimself had been picked up in the dragnet that followed Sadat'sassassination;hehadbeenimprisonedandtortured, he had taken to the road, vowing to return to a landcleansedbyanIslamicrebellion.Itwashewhohad made that essential distinction between the "near enemy" (the regime at home) and the "distant enemy" (theUnitedStates).ThemaninthesaddleinCairowas atoncean"ally"inthewarontheterror,andasourceof somuchoftheresentmentthatgaverisetotheterror...
...No one had the perfect "strongman" to put forward for Iraq, butauthoritarianismwasbeingheldoutastheanswer tothebloodshed...
...Henceforth the Arab political world would pass to monarchs and officers and religious guides...
...On November 7--three years to the day after President Bush's speech to the National Endowment for Democracy--the voters handed control of Congress to a new majority that had shown scant interest intheaffairs,andtheredemption,ofthepeoplesofthe Arab and Muslim world...
...There were limits toAmerica'spower,andthismilitaryrulertestedthem...
...landfromSyriantyranny.Adominionofthreedecades was abandoned, as Syrian forces raced across the border...
...The series is supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation...
...When you stand for liberty, we will stand with you...
...The whole weight of that order of power was arrayed against the success of Iraq--the weight of the rulers, and of the oppositionists alike, the religious warrants giventhedeedsofterrorinIraq,theArabsatellitetelevision channels granting air and cover for the "resistance"anditsbrutalities.Theonegifttheseneighboring ArabstatescouldgrantIraqanditsAmericanstewards is the one they would never give: They could stem the tide of the jihadists from their midst making their way toIraq.ButIraqtodayiswhatAfghanistanwasageneration earlier: a dumping ground for a fierce breed of pitiless younger men unreconciled to the prevailing orderinArablands...
...It was said by the embattled liberals that they would havehadachancehaditnotbeenfortheArabdebacle inPalestine,andforthediplomacyinthatstruggle,and aroundit,thathadtarnishedBritishreputation,andby extension, the standing of the liberal project itself...
...ButitwasinBaghdadin2003-2005thatanew Arabexperimentwasunfolding--thedraftingofaconstitution, and a referendum that sustained it, two national elections held in the shadow of a terrifying violence...
...IT COULDN'T HAVE BEEN EASY WORK, this new project ofrepairingArablands.Americadidnotknowthat world with the intimacy and detail it should have...
...And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophicharmtoourcountry,andtoourfriendsit wouldberecklesstoacceptthestatusquo...
...Bythelate1930sandearly1940s,FascistandNazi ideas would blow through Arab lands, seducing the young, offering them a false dream of grandeur and nationalpower.Liberalism,itcouldbesaid,wasnever incontention.Theriseofavowedlyilliberalforces,and the drumbeats of the Muslim Brotherhood, were a herald of things to come...
...He has this wholesome but naive view that Westerners' notions of liberty are easily transported to that area of the world...
...Slyandcunning,Mubarakhadreducedthepolitical life of Egypt to a standoff between his security apA P R I L 2 0 0 7 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R 3 3 In these impatient times, and ignoring the impact that America's unprecedented involvement is having on politics in the region, even true Western liberals now unfortunately regard democratization in the Middle East as nothing but a fool's errand...
...TheAmericansarecoming," it was widely believed in the Arab world in 2002-03,andtheIslamistsandthedictatorsscurried for cover in the aftermath of the destruction of the Taliban regime...
...He took America's coin, but went his own way...
...George W. Bush surely had reason to ask in 2006...
...In thisargument,BritainandFrance,thetwomandatory powers, had not sent the best of themselves into the region.ItwasnottheheirsofVoltairewhohadcometo Greater Syria but the colonial Troupes du Levant and the Senegalese and Moroccan troops who put downpopularrebellions.Britainhadnotcomeatthepeakof its confidence to enlighten and educate (as had been thecaseinIndiaacenturyearlier).Itwasawar-weary power that had made its appearance in Arab lands in the aftermath of the First World War, keen to achieve hegemonyonthecheap,andtorulewithairpowerand dealswithtribesanddynasties...
...He had had a tin ear for the great strugglethatplayedoutonhiswatchasstewardofAmerican foreign policy--the demise of the Soviet Union, the breakupofYugoslavia,theendofthepost-WorldWarII international order...
...But the force of the history that America unleashed by upending the regime of Saddam Hussein had its claims...
...HISTORICAL ANALOGIES are always flawed...
...These Iraqi voters holdinguptothecamerastheirindexfingersdippedin purple ink were partaking of a tradition that dictatorF O U A DA J A M I A P R I L 2 0 0 7 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R 3 5 Bythelate1930sandearly1940s, FascistandNaziideaswouldblow throughArablands,seducingthe young,offeringthemafalsedream ofgrandeurandnationalpower...
...It was left with petitioning a great, foreign power--a power, it has to be conceded, many of these samepetitionersdidnotfullytrustorsupport...
...What the late Anglo-Arab historian Albert Hourani dubbed "Arabic thought in the liberal age" would come to grief...
...In truth, the American regency has had a difficult time coming to terms with the Shia coalition leading the fractious government in Iraq...
...America had been on the ground there for welloversixdecades,butitsaccesstotheculture,andto the wellsprings of the society, was limited in the extreme.ItwasknownthattheopponentsoftheHouseof Saud--the opponents who mattered--were not liberal Western-educated types, but zealous ultra-Wahhabis who had begun agitating against the realm in the aftermathoftheGulfWarof1990-91,onthegroundsthatthe rulers had "defiled" the realm by opening the Arabian Peninsula--thelandoftheProphetandtherevelation--toavastAmericanmilitarypresence.TheHouseofSaud mayhave"winked"atreligiousfundamentalism,itmay havegivenfoddertothereligiousextremists,protected itself by tolerating, perhaps encouraging, a malignant anti-Americanism.Buttheserulershadworkedoutthe terms of an accommodation with the custodians of Americanpower.Nooneinthecirclesthatmatteredin AmericanforeignpolicygenuinelybelievedthatArabia wouldsprouta"liberal"alternativetotherulers.Ithad beentheprudentthingtoletwellenoughalone...
...Seven months after the destruction of hisregime,SaddamHusseinwasstillontheloose,and the hunt for weapons of mass destruction had run aground...
...But Palestinian society had been greatly damaged, authority in it issued from a good throwing arm and from the rifle...
...Thisnewpoliticalwayhadnotyethaditsrun.But wejudgequicklytoday,andthecriticsofthisdiplomacy of freedom were anxious to proclaim its demise.Wehadshakenupthatworldonlytoreap a whirlwind, it was said...
...But they further add that history would vindicate him--the apocalypse that would come two decades later, then the search for collective securitythathadbeenWilson'scauseallalong...
...In the end it is bound to be discredited, to be called a dream of an idealist who failed to realize the danger until it was too late to check those who attempt the principle in force...
...The regime's goons were terrorizing peaceful demonstrators in Cairo's streets, the ruler was showing every sign that he had in mind a dynastic succession for his son...
...WeentreatAmericatodoallitcantoensurethat asmallnumberofauthoritarianrulerswillnotcontrol the future of more than 300 million Arabs, more than halfofwhomarenotyet20yearsold,"alargegroupof Arab and Muslim activists and thinkers, more than 100 in all, wrote in an open letter addressed to President Bush in late 2006...
...Still, we now would be warned that our troubles can be laid at the doorstep of a resurgentShi'ism...
...Samuel Huntington and Robert Dahl, two of democracy'sprincipal theorists in our time, have made this point withtellingdetail.In15ofthe29democraticcountries in1970,democraticregimesweremidwifedbyforeign rule, or had come into being right after independence from foreign occupation...
...As long as the Middle East remains a placewherefreedomdoesnotflourish,itwillremaina place for stagnation, resentment, and violence for export...
...The opinions expressed in this series are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the viewsoftheJohnTempletonFoundation...
...What order we provide, what liberties we secure, will always be the offerings of a foreign power: They are to be taken without an open acknowledgementofthedebtowedthegiver...
...4 0 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R A P R I L 2 0 0 7 L I B E R T YF O RS T R A N G E R S Americanliberalismnowleftittoa conservativeAmericanpresidentto upholdliberty'sappealandthe possibilityofitsspreadinArabIslamiclands...
...Theindustrialist,"writeshistorianJosephGrabill,"soughtastrategicAmericanpresence in the lands of the Ottoman empire...
...And they wouldfinditeasytoseeintheresultsoftheelections-the triumph of the big Kurdish, Shia, and Sunni Arab electoralslates--avictoryforsectarianismandforthe politicsofidentity...
...And there was Lebanon, a country modern and "hip" enough to be familiar to the American sensibility.Intheaftermathofthatterriblecrimethattookthe life of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, on February14,2005,theLebaneseappearedtoretrievetheir L I B E R T YF O RS T R A N G E R S 3 4 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R A P R I L 2 0 0 7 Slyandcunning,Mubarakhadreduced thepoliticallifeofEgypttoastandoff betweenhissecurityapparatusonone side,andadark,incoherentIslamist movementontheother...
...Freedom and democracy are the only way to rebuild a world where violence is replaced by peaceful public debate and participation, and despair is replaced by hope, tolerance and dignity...
...THELANDSCAPEOFARABPOLITICSwasknown--problematic rulers and, often, worse oppositionists.Inthewings,therelurkedtheIslamists,and therulerswereshrewdenoughtoremindusoftheterrible choice that lay before American power...
...The Realist tradition does not think much of that chapter of American diplomacy...
...HereinlaythedilemmaofArabliberalism:It has not been able to win on the ground, it could not hold its own against the autocrats, or against the weight and the power of Islamist radicalism for that matter...
...the effort was stillborn, along with the rest of Wilson's program...
...It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives...
...It had been DodgewhogavesustenancetotheideaofanAmerican mandate in Armenia in 1919-20...
...On the eve of Iraq's first national election,themayorofBaghdadcaughtthemoodofthe time, and the hopes pinned on Iraq...
...It was into this climate of opinion that the Iraq Study Group headed by James Baker and Lee Hamilton released its readingofthatwar,andofthestakesinit...
...The Shia politicalleaders,PrimeMinisterNurial-Malikiincluded,hailed from the modest social classes of their community...
...Mubarak waited out America's moment of confidence, and he took the carnage in Iraq as a vindication of his own belief that the Arab lands--his above all--were ill equippedforfreedom...
...FOR ALL OF THE POWER thatAmericawoulddeploy in Arab lands, and for all the exhortations, America could not want freedom for the Arabs more than they wanted it themselves...
...Sunni fundamentalists had brought L I B E R T YF O RS T R A N G E R S 3 6 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R A P R I L 2 0 0 7 Wehadbetonfreedom,buttheArabs didnothaveitintheirDNA;wehad comefromafaronlytodiscoverthat thosewhowouldwageronthereform oftheArabconditionwouldbe plowingthesea...
...Where Arabia lived off its wealth, the Egyptian regime receivedAmericanlargesse,asitletplayinitslandadark anti-Americanism.ThiswasthehomelandofalQaeda's influentialCairene,Aymanal-Zawahiri.Itwasfromthe ranks of Egypt's Islamists that al Qaeda's most embittered and vengeful activists had emerged...
...There had always been in liberal internationalism a measure of coynessabouttheabilityoflibertytoslipborders,and to put down roots in cultures beyond the West...
...Biden of courseknewbetter.HehadwarnedthePresidentthat democracy is "more than elections," that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's view of liberty differed from "our A P R I L 2 0 0 7 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R 3 9 F O U A DA J A M I Wilsonscholarsandsympathizers remindusthattheAmericanpeople werenotprepared,in1920,forthe worldleadership--andtheburdens-thatWilsonofferedthem...
...There was no denying the nobility of rescuing Lebanon from its long Syrian captivity...
...The feeling of devotion to the little native country does not exist among Lebanese officials and everyone of them is always ready, according to a well-known local expression, to sethiscountryonfiretolighthiscigarette,"oneJoseph Couget, a French diplomat who knew Lebanon, observedinamemorableverdictdecadesago.Innotime, theLebanese--withhelpfromtheSyriantyrannynext door, and from the Iranians further afield--would be backtothefeudsoftheirhistory...
...Look at the trial of Saddam Hussein, it playedoutontelevision,gaveltogavel.OrdinaryArabs couldseeforthemselvesthattherulersarenotdeities.Think of Hosni Mubarak expressing horror that Saddam Hussein, once a fellow ruler, was sent to the gallows...
...Avigorousdebatewasragingintheinnercirclesof the Bush administration about Hosni Mubarak...
...In the shadows, the Arab political class in the "moderate" states warns of thedangerofanascendantIran.Intheirfashion,these ArabswouldlikenothingmorethananAmericanmilitary campaign that would lay to waste Iran's nuclear ambitionsandputanendtothisnewPersianmenace...
...it was bailed out by high oil prices...
...this principle, often violated in practice, had nonetheless been the central difference between the European and American strands of liberalism...
...They were told that the "realists" had returned to positions of greatpowerinAmericandiplomacy.Whatthey knew of these realists, of James Baker, and of Brent Scowcroft, what they remembered, was that thesemenwereintheinnersanctumofpower,backin 1991, when their rebellion, and that of the Kurds, were put down with great heartlessness and indifference...
...In Lebanon,the"CedarRevolution"whichhadlookedso promisingayearearlierhadyieldedtoagreatstandoff, and Hezbollah had run away with the politics of the Shia--the country's largest community...
...The Palestinians were to hold an election in early 2006, andtheywereboundtofalter...
...Cold War liberalism had committed travesties of its own in ThirdWorldsettings.ButtheAmericanideaofliberty had always had a strain of optimism and redemptionism.ThreeyearsintotheIraqwar,andtheBushstewardship, liberalism now spoke in entirely different terms...
...This man of Kuwait, unsentimental about his world, had a fair reading of the Arab malady...
...Few if any believed that there were brigades of liberals in these places waiting for a signfromtheAmericans.Itwasknowninthewaysuch things are known that the opponents of these regimes were themselves often at odds with American values...
...Wilson had given birth to an intellectual and political inheritance way beyond his modest expectations for it...
...It was not naive idealism that had given birth to thediplomacyoffreedom.November2003hadbeena Liberty for Strangers: IAmerican Power and the Predicament of the Arabs time of crisis...
...TherewasabriefreignofaShiadynasty(ofPersianate origins at that) in Baghdad in the middle years of the tenthcentury;ithadbeenfollowedbyaSunnirestoration, and an unbroken history of Sunni ascendancy...
...And how many military divisions does Arab liberalism have...
...The dominant order in the region had nothing of its own to offer, it had bet that the foreign power would weary of its work, and that the terrible habits of centuries--the weight of retrogression, the sectarianism, the absence of civic traditions--would carrytheday.Iraqiscouldpleadthattheyneededtime, that it was too early to write off this project in their country,butthebeliefthatthiswasalandinhospitable to freedom had acquired new respectability...
...Their knowledge of the American political system was limitedintheextreme,andtheyhadnothadanywhere nearthetrafficandexperiencewithAmericapossessed bytheircounterpartsintheneighboringArabcapitals...
...No one was under any illusions about the kind of workitwouldtaketoopenuptheentrenchedregimesin Saudi Arabia and Egypt...
...In the ebb and flow of liberty, power always mattered, and liberty always needed the protection of the ascendant states in theinternationalorder...
...But the Wilsonian idea would endure, and the American missionary spirit would leave its indelible mark on the earlyphaseofArabnationalism...
...they now wished to release themselves from the vigilance of 9/11, and the wars fought in the aftermath of that terrible day...
...Arabia was terra incognita, a realm virtually sealed to outsiders...
...I think the President thinks there's a ThomasJeffersonorMadisonbehindeverysanddune waitingtojumpup.Andtherearenone...
...These men were strangers to America's ways...
...IT IS AS TELLING A TESTIMONY asanyontheweakness of Arab liberalism that it was only the American war in Iraq that had given this political current a new lease on life...
...He had been brutal with a noted academic at the American University of Cairo, the sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim--a man who held American citizenshipatthat.Hehadhimdispatchedtoprison,ashe did the political oppositionist Ayman Nour, who was givenafive-yearprisonsentence...
...IN TRUTH, THE ARGUMENT that liberty springs from within and can't be given distant peoples is more tendentious than meets the eye...
...Thatkindof "realism"isviewedwithdreadbyapeople whotellhistoryinmetaphorsofjusticeandbetrayal...
...Wilson scholars and sympathizers remind us that the American people were not prepared, in 1920, for the world leadership--and the burdens--that Wilson offered them...
...The opponents of the regime were acheckeredlot:IslamistsatoddswithWesternvalues, liberalsecularistsgiventopan-Arabismandtoareflexive anti-Americanism...
...More to the point, he and Bush SeniorhadstoodidlybyasSaddamHusseinputdown, withgreatcruelty,theShiaandKurdishrebellionsthat President Bush called for in the course of the first Gulf War.Bakerhadreturnedunrepentant,byhisreckoning hewastobeourguideintotheoldbazaarintheregion...
...Beirut was a city of tactics, the clear-eyed George Shultz once observed of the place as he came to master its ways in the 1980s...
...This was in keeping with an old history: In the inter-waryears,afragileArabliberalismunabletocontend with the appeal of collectivist doctrines of every stripe, and with the power of the established order of tribes and monarchs, wrote a self-serving history that explained away its weakness as a result of its betrayal at the hands of the Pax Britannica--and of the French...
...It is too late for that, he observed to me...
...Setting political correctness aside, a foreign policy luminary of the Democratic Party, Sen...
...And this cause of freedomindistantlandswouldnowcontendwithacurious mixofobstacles:thedifficultsoilofArab-Islamicpolitical culture, and the conviction in liberal American opinion that it was a fool's errand to take liberty to strangers...
...His most recent book is The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans,TheArabsandtheIraqisinIraq.Thisessayisthe seventhinaten-partseriesbeingpublishedinsuccessive issues of The American Spectator under the general title,"ThePursuitofLiberty:CantheIdealsThatMade America Great Provide a Model for the World...
...It wasn'tunfettered,thisnewdiplomaticdrive,butithad blunt messages for the rulers in Tehran and Damascus, and there was a shot across the bow, it should be recalled,intendedfortheregimesinRiyadhandCairo...
...view of liberty...
...In Wilsonianism was incarnate the central dramaofAmericaontheworldstage:America'sideologyhas,inasense,beenrevolutionary,whiledomestically Americans have considered themselves satisfied withthestatus-quo...
...He opposed America in Iraq, he second-guessed it on Israeli-Palestinianmatters.Hebelittledthecauseofliberty,hewasthecoponthebeatgivingeveryindication that things would not change in his realm...
...Henry Kissinger, one of America's most influential and brilliant practitioners and theorists of Realpolitik, gave the Wilsonian inheritance its due in remarks that bode well for Bush's diplomacy of freedom: "The League of Nations failed to take hold in America because the country was not ready for so globalarole.Nevertheless,Wilson'sintellectualvicto-ry proved more seminal than any political triumph couldhavebeen.For,wheneverAmericahasfacedthe taskofconstructinganewworldorder,ithasreturned in one way or another to Woodrow Wilson's precepts...
...And the Secretary of State would make an allusion to all that: "Now the Egyptian Government must put its faith in its own people...
...shipandrevolutionshadpushedasideinArablife...
...The liberals would be reduced to the squabbles of frustrated intellectuals...
...There were no liberals in those forbidding "sand dunes...
...The feeling had taken hold among them that Americahadallbutwrittenthemofftoaccommodate the Sunni Arabs within Iraq and beyond...
...True, a big ideological and security challenge hadrisenintheregion,anewPersianchallengefrom theeast.WehadMoqtadaal-SadrinIraq,andHezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon, turbaned Shia clerics,armedsayyids.Theywerecrudeandavowed enemiesoftheAmericanpresenceinArablands.They were outsiders who had risen to sudden power...
...They were not exactly "isolationists,"themenandwomenwhonowcontrolledthat branchofgovernment.Buttherewasahesitant"Come Home,America"thatcouldbediscernedthroughtheir utterances.Theydidn'ttellusoutrightthattheydidn't believethatdemocracycantraveltoArablands(politicalcorrectnesswouldprecludethatsortofcandor,for it had always been conservatism that argued that culture determines political outcomes) but this much, too, could be inferred about them...
...Those elections were, vicariously, pan-Arab affairs.MenandwomenwerenotvotinginEgypt,orin Syria or in the Arabian Peninsula...
...There was supreme irony in all that...
...Lebanon's Shia community now faced a great choice:homeandhearthandLebanonismononeside, subserviencetoSyriaandIranontheother.Doubtless, untold numbers of Shiites wanted fidelity to home, A P R I L 2 0 0 7 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R 3 7ForthereistodayakindofArab absencefromhistory,andthelands oftheArabworldseemlikea battlegroundbetweenPax AmericanaandIran.F O U A DA J A M I and order and normalcy...
...for a war that had turned deadlier and more difficult thantheearlyexpectationshadprophesiedforit.But Wilsonianism, too, had been an improvised affair, and the man who had let loose its passions had not been fully prepared for what was to come...
...he would be one of a handful of people who would set up anannuityforWilsonwhenhispresidencycametoan end.DodgewasdrivenbyapassionfortheArmenians, andfortheNearEast...
...A generation earlier, we had known Baker as a supreme fixer...
...He was bribed and cajoled, he was given accesstoPresidentBush,healsohadaportionofEgypt's aid withheld on one occasion...
...It will be said that the analogy with Wilson and Wilsonianism overreaches, that Bush had stumbled upon his diplomacy of freedom in the course of the Iraq war, that he was merely in search of a rationale 3 8 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R A P R I L 2 0 0 7 L I B E R T YF O RS T R A N G E R S "OrdinaryArabscouldseeforthemselves thattherulersarenotdeities.Thinkof HosniMubarakexpressinghorrorthat SaddamHussein,onceafellowruler, wassenttothegallows...
Vol. 40 • April 2007 • No. 3
