Foreign Policy In Focus
March 27 2007
Regional Implications of the Iraq War
Chris Toensing | March 27, 2007
Editor: Erik Leaver, IPS
President George W. Bush’s vision for the Iraq War was nothing if not
expansive. Liberal democracy and popular sovereignty were to supplant
tyranny not only in Baghdad, but in nearby capitals as well. And the
force of U.S. arms would not be needed to accomplish the latter
missions. As Bush asserted to eager applause at the American
Enterprise Institute on February 25, 2003, `a new regime in Iraq
would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other
nations in the region.’ Democracy, the war party believed, would be
contagious.
In Syria and Iran, the authoritarian regimes would be chastened by
Washington’s show of force into acquiescence to U.S. foreign policy
goals, and shaken by popular unrest into domestic reforms. In Egypt,
Jordan and the Arab Gulf states, the equally brittle regimes would
bow to similar popular agitation lest their ties to Washington
loosen. Regime change in Iraq would even end the notoriously
intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some neo-conservatives
promised, by cutting off external support for Hamas and Islamic
Jihad, and erasing the remnants of Arab `strategic depth’ for the
Palestinian Authority’s resistance to Israeli terms for a final
settlement.
All the breathless claims for the democracy-and peace-building
potential of the invasion were made before it was launched. But no
one took them terribly seriously until early 2005, when pro-war
commentators convinced themselves that Bush’s vision was being
realized. Elections were scheduled in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, and
Egypt. In the most dramatic event of the `Arab spring,’ Syrian troops
were pushed out of Lebanon. Bus drivers and teachers launched wildcat
strikes in Tehran. Israel announced a unilateral pullout from the
Gaza Strip.
Suddenly, the Iraq War loomed even larger in the historical sweep of
post-World War II U.S. Middle East policy. For decades, Republican
and Democratic administrations alike had pursued three fundamental
goals in the region–the security of Israel, the westward flow of
cheap oil, and the stability of cooperative regimes. Now Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice was telling a Cairene audience the third goal
was history. `For 60 years,’ she said, `my country, the United
States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region
here in the Middle East–and we achieved neither.’ It was an accurate
diagnosis, but was she serious that Washington had repented of its
stability worship? And was the `Arab spring’ proving that `Bush was
right’ about the regional reverberations of the Iraq War, as the
likes of Charles Krauthammer were trumpeting? Even a few hardened
cynics had to wonder.
Two years later, the verdict is in: Most Middle Eastern governments
are just as autocratic as they were before the war, if not more so.
In Iran, Israel and Turkey, three democratic (or quasi-democratic)
exceptions to the regional rule, there are newly vibrant
authoritarian currents. Two other countries that were partially
democratic before the war, Lebanon and Palestine, are much more
unstable, and democratic progress remains hampered by ongoing
conflicts with Israel, which are, if anything, more deeply entrenched
than in 2003. The Bush administration continues to mouth
pro-democracy slogans, particularly in its support of elections for
elections’ sake, but the actual outcomes of democratic exercises in
the Middle East since the Iraq War have sent the White House back
into the arms of its traditional allies.
Egypt, Jordan, and Yemen: The `Arab Spring’ Thaws
Take Egypt, the site of Rice’s pledge to reverse 60 years of backing
for kings, dictators, and presidents-for-life in the Middle East. She
used the same speech to praise the regime of President Husni Mubarak,
who has occupied the palace since 1980, for its February 2005
decision to hold a multi-candidate presidential election for the
first time in the country’s history. This decision was a key signal
to the Western press of the `Arab spring,’ and, as elsewhere, a
closer look would have exposed the spring’s false promise. Already
when Rice spoke, the Egyptian regime had imposed so many restrictions
on who could run in the presidential race that Mubarak was guaranteed
to win. Most importantly, candidacy was largely limited to members of
`legal’ political parties, a stipulation that excluded members of the
outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest and best-organized
political force. To run as an independent, a presidential hopeful had
to garner the signatures of at least 80 members of Parliament and ten
municipal council members from at least 14 provinces. Both Parliament
and the municipal councils were dominated by the ruling National
Democratic Party. Sure enough, Mubarak won an election that few
Egyptians took seriously, but to Washington, Egypt had taken a `step
in the right direction.’
Where exactly Egypt was headed was revealed two months after the
presidential election, during the balloting for the lower house of
Parliament. As it had done during previous elections in 1995 and
2000, citing ambiguous threats of violence, the regime deployed its
riot police in force near polling stations, particularly in poor
urban and rural areas off the beaten track of the international
press. As in 1995 and 2000, the violence came mostly from the police,
intervening to `protect’ regime supporters (or people the regime had
bribed) brought in from other districts to cast illegal ballots.
Unlike in 1995 and 2000, these tactics did not completely succeed in
returning a parliament of regime loyalists, thanks to vigilant
supervision of the voting by Egypt’s relatively autonomous judiciary.
Members of the Muslim Brotherhood (running as independents) won an
unprecedented 88 seats. Would the Bush administration welcome this
result, an Arab election that had actually produced limited change?
The answer is clearly no. For the last two years, Mubarak’s regime
has targeted Muslim Brotherhood activists for intimidation and
arbitrary arrest, as part of a wider campaign to gut any and all
effective political opposition as the regime prepares what looks like
an engineered succession of Mubarak’s son to the presidency.
Thirty-two Muslim Brothers face charges of inciting violence before
military tribunals, which lack any due process, after being acquitted
of the same charges in civil courts. The regime is moving to
undermine the independence of the judges who certified the Muslim
Brotherhood’s electoral gains. Even young bloggers who decry the
regime’s depredations have been sent to the country’s jails, where
cell phone cameras have captured for all to see on the Internet the
police brutality and torture for which the prisons have long been
notorious. Egypt’s population has long been alienated from the
regime, but perhaps there has never been more disgust with the
regime’s sheer indifference to the population’s crying social needs,
a feeling of revulsion greatly intensified by Mubarak’s alliance with
Washington.
In almost all other U.S.-allied Arab states, the details are
different, but the big picture is the same: Far from becoming more
democratic since the invasion of Iraq, the regimes have rolled back
reforms and cracked down on dissent. In Jordan, the king used an
arbitrary suspension of Parliament from 2001-2003 to ram through over
100 `temporary laws’ curtailing (among others) the rights of free
speech and public assembly. The country’s public life has never been
the same, with increased state security surveillance and disruption
of all manner of protests and civil society activities. In Yemen, the
president (who has ruled longer than any Arab leader save Col.
Muammar Qaddafi) first withdrew his name for reelection, then staged
an elaborate `comeback’ justified in part by a pesky rebellion
against his rule in the remote northern highlands. With no apparent
encouragement from Washington, and no visible link to the Iraq War,
women won the franchise and a popular movement won more democratic
elections in tiny Kuwait. But in the granddaddy of all the
petro-princedoms, Saudi Arabia, there has been no liberalizing reform
to speak of.
Iran and Turkey: Softening of Democracy
If the Iraq War and its ex post facto justification, the Bush
democracy doctrine, have failed to open up allied autocratic states
in the Middle East, in the region’s three most democratic countries
there are ominous signs of backsliding. When the Bush administration
took office, the clerical regime in Iran faced mounting challenges
both within the state and without. From the inside, reform-minded
Islamists led by President Mohammad Khatami pushed to allow greater
freedom of expression and modify the constitution to curb the power
of unelected clerical bodies that hold super-parliamentary
prerogatives. The conservative backlash began in the late 1990s, but
the reformists were not helped by Washington’s refusal to see them as
different in kind from their hardline foes. President George W.
Bush’s designation of Iran as part of an `axis of evil’ in 2002
empowered the hardliners further, as they could credibly claim that
the `Great Satan’ would spurn every olive branch the reformists
wanted to proffer. Conservative electoral victories–helped along by
the unelected clerical bodies–in 2004 and 2005 sealed the
reformists’ fate. The democratic aspects of the Iranian polity are
greatly weakened, partly because of the belligerent rhetoric coming
from the White House. Particularly under the new president, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, the central government has stepped up repression of
students, workers and women’s rights activists.
Turkey offered a test of the Bush administration’s respect for
democracy even before the war. In early 2003, the Turkish
legislature, newly controlled by the `soft Islamist’ Justice and
Development Party, voted to deny the U.S. the right to attack Iraq
from bases on Turkish soil. Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy defense
secretary, let it be known he fully expected the Turkish military to
lean on the legislators to change their mind. The message could not
have been lost on a country that has experienced multiple and brutal
military coups in the last several decades. In the end, Turkey
allowed air raids on Iraq from its soil, but not a northern front of
the ground war. This was not enough for Wolfowitz, who told Congress
in late March 2003 that `Turkey had made a big, big error…. It was a
new government that I think didn’t quite know what it was doing.’
Since the invasion, the Turkish military and security services–known
to Turks as the `deep state’–have reasserted themselves, to the
detriment of Turkish democracy. They are resisting even the Justice
and Development Party’s modest efforts to reach out to the country’s
Kurdish population, and inveighing against any ceasefire with the
renewed Kurdish insurgency in the southeast. Far-right social
elements associated with the `deep state’ are rallying in favor of
chauvinistic versions of Turkish nationalism; in January, one such
militant murdered an Armenian-Turkish journalist who sought to
reconcile Turks’ and Armenians’ understandings of the 1915 Armenian
genocide. Extremist, anti-democratic politics are also on the rise in
Israel, where new Minister of Strategic Affairs Avigdor Lieberman
proposes `transferring’ Palestinian citizens in Israel, against their
will, to the non-sovereign Palestinian entity in the West Bank.
Lebanon and Palestine: No Transformation
Outside of Iraq, the neo-conservatives’ `transformational’ vision has
been most grievously wrong in its predictions–and most devastating
in its consequences–in Lebanon and Palestine. Following the
assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri in
February 2005, long-standing, cross-confessional resentment of the
Syrian military and intelligence `presence’ in the country boiled
over into weeks of `Syria out!’ demonstrations. The rallies were
partly driven by traditional sectarian parties with a reactionary
agenda, including the right-wing Christian Lebanese Forces, but
partly by non-sectarian Lebanese youth who yearned for a genuinely
new kind of politics. Commentators like Krauthammer rushed to credit
regime change in Iraq for what the State Department named the `Cedar
Revolution’ (Lebanese called it the Independence Intifada), but there
was precious little connection. In the event, the Lebanese elections
preceded by Syria’s departure made clear that old-style confessional
politics was firmly entrenched. The remaining spirit of the
Independence Intifada dissipated. Furthermore, the end of Syrian
hegemony in Lebanon did not leave behind an undifferentiated
pro-American population, as the neo-conservatives puffed that it
would.
Hizballah emerged as an even more powerful player with its patron
Syria gone, increasing its share of the legislature through an
alliance with the Christian Free Patriotic Movement of Gen. Michel
Aoun, and joining the cabinet for the first time ever. The Party of
God’s political rivals proved unable to disarm its militia, which was
still admired by many Lebanese for resisting the Israeli occupation
of the south that ended in 2000. When Hizballah fighters crossed the
Israeli border to attack an army convoy in July 2006, the party’s
Sunni, Christian, and Druze adversaries joined the U.S. and its main
Arab allies in blaming Hizballah for the massive bombardment Israel
rained upon Lebanon in retaliation. The U.S. actively blocked a
ceasefire for a month to give Israel free rein, but Hizballah
fighters stood their ground. The predictably bitter political fallout
of the 34-day war culminated in Hizballah’s decision to pull its
ministers out of the cabinet, and, in concert with Aoun and other
allies, call upon the Lebanese government to resign. In the name of
respecting the results of the 2005 elections, the Bush administration
openly sided with the government, bolstering its resolve to outlast
the Hizballah-led opposition and boosting the likelihood of civil
strife. The Bush administration contributes to the structural
Lebanese crisis and sectarianism in the region with its refusal to
consider Hizballah–the main representative of Lebanon’s largest
sect, the Shi`a–as anything but a `terrorist organization.’
But no case demonstrates the supremacy of the `with us or against us’
motto in White House thinking than the Palestinians. When Yasser
Arafat was alive, the Bush administration conditioned the restarting
of meaningful Israeli-Palestinian negotiations upon `reform’ of the
Palestinian Authority (PA)–presumably meaning elections and
anti-corruption measures. The White House celebrated Mahmoud Abbas’
accession to the Palestinian presidency in January 2005 as a
harbinger of the `Arab spring,’ but did nothing to advance the cause
of peace in the next year, permitting Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon to drive events with his unilateral `disengagement’ from Gaza.
After the Israeli pullout, U.S. engagement was again delayed until
Abbas proved his security services could maintain `calm’ in the
impoverished strip. All bets were off after the January 2006
elections swept Hamas into control of the Palestinian Legislative
Council. Though the elections got a clean bill of health from veteran
observer Jimmy Carter, the U.S. and Israel refused to deal with the
democratically chosen Palestinian government unless it met three
Israeli conditions. The U.S. and Israel organized an international
boycott of the Hamas-led PA, depriving the quasi-government of the
aid dollars it desperately needs to pay civil servants’ salaries. As
civil servants and their families compose over 30 percent of the
population in the West Bank and Gaza, the boycott of the PA was, in
effect, an attempt to starve the Palestinians into turning against
their elected leaders. Such was also the transparent aim of the
intense Israeli bombing and tank incursions in Gaza pursuant to the
capture of a single Israeli soldier in June 2006. These measures
ultimately failed to unseat Hamas, but did help persuade Abbas to
form a `national unity’ government with the Islamists. The Bush
administration has so far rejected this new cabinet as a step
backward for Palestinian democracy.
Conclusion
None of the truly anti-democratic developments in U.S.-allied states
are of any visible concern to the Bush administration. Aid packages
to countries like Israel, Egypt and Jordan are unaffected. The State
Department issues mild rebukes at displays of state repression by its
Arab friends, but nothing like the broadsides fired at Tehran.
Indeed, the democratic `transformation’ of the region is now clearly
subordinate to good old power politics, as the Bush administration
attempts to assemble an Egyptian-Jordanian-Saudi-Israeli front
against Iran. To scare their chafing populations off the possibility
of change, authoritarian regimes merely point at the inferno the Bush
administration calls `democracy’ in Iraq. At the same time, it is
easier than ever for autocrats to caricature Middle Easterners who
advocate concepts like the rule of law and human rights as tools of
the imperialist West. Contrary to the stated aspirations of
Washington hawks before the invasion, the Iraq War has dealt a body
blow to the many Middle Eastern activists who were working for
democracy and peace long before the Bush administration entered
office. On these grounds alone, the war has been an unmitigated
disaster.
Chris Toensing is editor of Middle East Report, publication of the
Middle East Research and Information Project and a contributor to
Foreign Policy In Focus.
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4109