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Hard Questions, Tough Answers with Yossi Alpher - February 7, 2005

Q. What are the implications of the recent elections in the Arab world? Q. What about Bush's tough talk in his State of the Union?

The views of Yossi Alpher, Israeli Security Expert, do not necessarily reflect those of Americans for Peace Now or
Peace Now.

Two democratic elections have recently been held in Arab countries: the Palestinian Authority and Iraq. What are the implications for the issue of reform in the Arab Middle East?

The implications appear to play out on a number of different levels. The first concerns the relationship between military occupation and elections. As the United Arab Emirates Information Agency (!) lamented on January 31, "why can honest and democratic elections only be held in Arab countries under occupation?" The issue becomes even more painful for Arab democrats--and satisfying for Washington neo-conservatives who have argued all along that democracy has to be imposed on the Arab world--when the Afghanistan elections, also held under occupation, are factored in.

Yet the real test of successful democratization-by-compellance will come only when occupation is removed. After all, Iraq held democratic elections under the British some 70 years ago, and Palestinians began electing their mayors under Israeli occupation back in 1970. Besides, last week's elections in Iraq could still lead to the disintegration of the Iraqi state or the rise of a hostile Shi'ite alliance in the Middle East, and will almost certainly strengthen Iran's hand--hardly the objectives of the American sponsors of democratic reform in the Middle East.

A second set of implications relates to the fact that the Middle East is made up, broadly speaking, of "republics" and monarchies, and that by many standards the monarchies are reforming faster than the republics. Jordan, Morocco, Bahrain and Qatar are generally seen to be moving faster toward development of civil society, rights for women and a modicum of representative democracy than, say, Syria and Egypt. On the other hand, these monarchies are generally among the smallest Middle East countries--Morocco is the exception--whereas the large masses of Arabs live in republics.

Nor are the republics really republican in structure; they are basically authoritarian regimes, some of which, like Syria and possibly Egypt sometime soon, have actually witnessed succession based on heredity (Bashar Asad in Syria; Gamal Mubarrak possibly in Egypt), which is more reminiscent of monarchies than republics. And Saudi Arabia, arguably the Arab Middle East's most important monarchy, is nowhere near the level of reform even of Egypt, not to mention the smaller monarchies.

To sum up, recent genuine democratic elections have indeed been by-products of occupation, and a few small monarchies have made some limited progress. This is a beginning, but a modest and problematic one. Particularly problematic is the role played by outside instigators of democratization like the neo-cons in Washington, who prefer to ignore the regional implications of their electoral enterprise in Iraq, and Binyamin Netanyahu and Nathan Sharansky in Israel, whose insistence that only democracy can prepare an Arab country for peace seems to evaporate when and where their own specific goal of settlement expansion is concerned.


Apropos Egypt and Saudi Arabia, President Bush addressed some pointed exhortations toward them in his 2005 State of the Union message. What are the implications of that speech for US Middle East policy?

Bush's State of the Union speech laid out an active American agenda of democratization and fighting terrorism for most of the Middle East. The president's appeals to the Saudi government to expand "the role of its people in determining their future" and to "the great and proud nation of Egypt" to "show the way toward democracy in the Middle East" must indeed be considered provocative, given the very close nature of Washington's strategic relationship with these two countries.

In particular, President Mubarrak of Egypt surely winced when he heard Bush's thinly veiled criticism of his country's lack of democracy. One of the reasons Mubarrak is making considerable efforts to assist with the Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire and Israeli disengagement from Gaza, and undertook to host a ceasefire summit at Sharm a-Sheikh, is precisely to "reward" the US with alternative achievements in the region in order to better fend off American pressure to democratize, which the regime in Cairo is certain would only strengthen Islamic fundamentalists. In this regard, a more nuanced interpretation of Bush's exhortation to Egypt is precisely that he hoped it would serve as an incentive to Mubarrak to contribute more energetically to the disengagement and ceasefire processes--rather than necessarily to democratize.

Still, Bush is consistent. He made almost identical remarks about the need for democratization in Saudi Arabia and Egypt in a speech to the National Endowment for Democracy in November 2003.

Bush seemingly endorsed the thesis about Arab monarchies democratizing faster than republics when he stated that "hopeful reform is already taking hold in an arc from Morocco to Jordan to Bahrain". He added Iraq to this context in noting that "the victory of freedom in Iraq will. . . inspire democratic reformers from Damascus to Tehran". Syria, incidentally, received the closest thing to a direct warning of potential US action to come--"we expect the Syrian government to end all support for terror and open the door to freedom"--whereas regarding Iran, "the world's primary state sponsor of terror", Bush took a more benign approach, merely noting that "we are working with European allies to make clear to the Iranian regime that it must give up its uranium enrichment program. . . and end its support for terror". This formulation was at least in part a gesture to the European Union, which rejects the use of force against Iran and with which the second Bush administration seeks to improve relations; it was echoed by Secretary of State Rice in her trip to Europe two days ago.

But the first item on Bush's Middle East agenda in his speech was building "the institutions of a peaceful, independent, democratic [Palestinian] state". To that end he announced he would ask Congress for $350 million to enable Palestinian reforms. This is an unprecedented sum by American aid standards for Palestine, but barely matches the EU's annual support. Moreover, it includes $50 million for Israel to build hi-tech transit points along the security fence. Nor did Bush indicate what he intended to do concerning a two-state solution beyond building Palestinian institutions.

The closing Middle East item was the issue of ending the occupation of Iraq. Faced with pressure by democrats and some critical republicans to set a date for leaving, Bush refused. Nor did he endorse previous mention of a readiness to leave whenever a democratically-elected Iraqi government makes that demand. Instead he presented a set of conditions for withdrawal--"a country that is democratic, representative of all its people, at peace with its neighbors, and able to defend itself"--that can easily be interpreted by Washington as justifying many more years of some form of military presence. When will the Iraqi government be representative of all its people, including the Sunnis? When will it be able to defend itself against, say, Iran? When will it be at peace with Syria, which is underhandedly supporting the insurrection?

Incidentally, the president neglected to mention, and take due credit for, an outstanding American achievement in the greater Middle East: the January 9 peace agreement between the Sudanese government and the southern rebels, achieved by the US together with the United Kingdom and Norway. Here is an instance in which Christian evangelical pressure on the administration to help the southern Christian population was constructively channeled, and paid off with an historic step toward north-south reconciliation. But then again, the president didn't mention Darfur, either.