Listen to the Arab Reformers...

[cantwealljustgetalong]

A much-anticipated summit of the Arab League, scheduled to begin today in Tunis, was abruptly put off Saturday, and for a remarkable reason: The kings, emirs and presidents-for-life of the Arab Middle East are unable to agree on a common response to the Bush administration's new policy of promoting democracy in their region. The younger and brighter rulers, knowing the stagnant status quo is unsustainable, are pushing a strategy of co-option, offering halfway, half-baked "reform" programs they have hastily drawn up. The less enlightened insist on sticking to the excuses that Arab dictators have offered the world for the past half-century: a) the first priority must be Israel, and b) foreign tutelage is wrong, except when applied to Israel.

The summit may now never happen; if it does, it will probably settle on a murky mix of these two responses. Either way, critics of the pro-democracy policy -- in Europe, in Washington and inside the Bush administration itself -- will again proclaim that a neocon attempt to "impose" democracy on the Middle East "from the outside" has foundered. That this resistance to elected government comes from a group of kings, emirs and presidents-for-life doesn't seem to trouble the critics. The assumption seems to be that the autocrats' objections are those of their own people.

Yet, they are not. The most underreported and encouraging story in the Middle East in the past year has been the emergence in public of homegrown civic movements demanding political change. Two years ago they were nonexistent or in jail. Now they are out in the open even in the most politically backward places in the region: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria. They are made up not only of intellectuals but of businessmen, women, students, teachers and journalists. Unlike their governments -- and the old school of U.S. and European Arabists -- they don't believe that change should be gradual, and they reject the dictators' claim that democracy would only empower Islamic extremists. It is the delay of change, they say, that is increasingly dangerous.

These people weren't created by George W. Bush. They are the homegrown answer to a decadent political order, and they ride a powerful historical current. But they will tell you frankly: The new U.S. democratization policy, far from being an unwanted imposition, has given them a voice, an audience and at least a partial shield against repression -- three things they didn't have one year ago.

"In the Middle East today, you talk about food, you talk about football -- and you talk about democracy," says Mohammed Kamal, a young political scientist from Egypt. "Some people condemn the Americans, others say, 'Look at the other side, these are universal values.' The point is that for the first time in many years, there is a serious debate going on in the Arab world about their own societies. The United States has triggered this debate, it keeps the debate going, and this is a very healthy development."

Kamal and another prominent Egyptian political scientist, Osama Ghazali Harb, were in Washington last week; both attended a groundbreaking meeting of civic organizations at Egypt's Alexandria Library earlier this month. The conference, unthinkable a year ago, produced a clarion call for democratic change -- one that was all but ignored by Western media.

...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32140-2004Mar28.html

[bemildred]

1. Interesting.

Somewhat correct as to the facts of the case, the Islamic
Middle East is largely young and literate, and most of the
more advanced states are already showing the declining birthrates
associated with modernization, and it seems likely that the
US deathgrip on the tarbaby in Iraq and the associated US
propaganda campaign have resulted in a certain inhibition of the
usual enthusiasm with which the US puppet regimes in the area
repress political dissent.

Laggards seem to be Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the Palistinian -
Israeli settler nexus, where one still finds double digit family
sizes to be common.

Nevertheless, the piece falls down on the implied assumption that
the US foreign policy elites have ever, now or in the past, given a
rats ass about political democracy in the Middle East, or that they
should get any credit for these developments, or that the Iraq war
had anything whatever to do with it.

[democratic]

2. ...

Iranians aren't Arabs, but Iranians had a democratically elected Secular government in 1953 when Iranians rioted against the Shah's dictatorship, only to have it overthrown by the CIA/MI6.

Again in 1979 the hope was to overthrow the Shah and install a democracy, but unfortunately another dictatorship more brutal than the Shah's come to power through the Islamic Republic.

So to say the discussion is a 'new thing' in Iran would be untrue.

It's never been in the West's interest to have a democratic Iran because a democratic Iran would be
a) Secular -getting rid of the Mullah trump card used by the Europeans and
b) Nationalist -no more cheap oil


But i see it in most of the Arab countries in the region.

[bemildred]

3. Yes, I know these things.

I have great hopes for Iran, if it can be left alone
long enough for peaceful change to occur. It should form
a formidable force for reform in the region it that comes
to pass as well.