Where Bush Got It Right

The matter had long since been decided: George W. Bush and his followers had failed spectacularly in the Middle East. Spreading human rights: mishandled in Abu Ghraib. Bringing democracy to the region: buried beneath a mountain of WikiLeaks documents. History’s sentence: carried out with a thrown shoe.

But since the revolutionary uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, the question deserves revisiting. Were the Bush administration and its neoconservative cheerleaders right — notwithstanding other motives — in propagating regime change? Can they now feel justified in thinking that most Middle Eastern people wanted nothing more than a better and freer life? Doesn’t their confidence that regime change in one Arab country would radiate across the entire region suddenly seem plausible?

On the other hand, aren’t the stunning developments a comeuppance for everybody who, motivated by self-interest, cowardice, stupidity or just plain brown-nosing, glorified the idea of a “critical dialog?” Don’t they expose the lies of those who called for an end to weapons exports, doubting that democracy in the Middle East was attainable or even desirable?

Don’t they expose people, like Peter Scholl-Latour, for example, who never tire of claiming that other cultures and nationalities want to live in other political structures, something that can only mean that Arabs (or Muslims) have no desire other than to live in bondage to smug dictators, patronized by an archaic morality and, unless they are descended from the oil monarchies, are damned to a life of chickpeas and pita bread?

Neoconservative Idealism

The program advanced by the neoconservatives was different. A decade after the supposed “end of history” it was, of all people, a sanctimonious American president who reminded us that liberation is possible if people fight against murdering dictators, but that peaceful sit-ins don’t always work. In his second inaugural address, Bush said, “All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: The United States will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors.”

The Iraq War, however, wasn’t justified with such words of revolutionary bourgeois idealism alone, but rather with arguments that later proved to be counterproductive. Bush made the fatal mistake of using the word “crusade”, and the vaunted weapons of mass destruction failed to materialize. Then there was the claim that Iraq was working with al-Qaida, something Bush got from the U.S. Army against their wishes.

Finally, there were the many hair-raising mistakes made by the Americans and British following the fall of the Hussein regime, including the already difficult task of forcing liberty on the population from the outside, the results of which were overcome only gradually.

Rice’s Snotty Cairo Speech

Nevertheless, whoever is angered by Western support for a Mubarak or a Ben Ali — both of whom look like choirboys compared to Saddam Hussein — is advised to recall that it was then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who uttered the sharpest public criticism Mubarak was ever obliged to listen to.

In a June 2005 address at Cairo University — the place where Barack Obama would deliver his well-tempered speech four years later — she brought up the subject of arbitrary arrests and beaten demonstrators in an almost snotty manner in order to make the self-critical observation, “For 60 years, the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East — and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.”

One stupidity: Rice was talking to an ally. An even greater stupidity: America never followed up with appropriate action. Instead, the United States continued its buddy-buddy relationship with the rulers of Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and entrenched them in the wake of the Iraq War. That destroyed what was absolutely necessary for a policy supposedly built on moral principles; it destroyed America’s credibility.

The ramifications of that included that there was no significant support for democratic movements in the region. Even Lebanon, the one Arab country that achieved a democratic breakthrough in that decade, was left hanging — first during the Israeli war against Hezbollah and then especially later in the post-war reconstruction, most of which was taken over by Syria and Iran.

The Failure of the Bush Doctrine

The Bush administration had its final defeat in another place: Palestine. Not because it broke with the consensus that progress on the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was impossible, but rather because it hesitated to recognize the Hamas election victory at the 2006 polls. There may have been good reasons to doubt whether Hamas would feel bound to support democracy and human rights at home and a balanced policy abroad, but they were never even given the chance to demonstrate anything at all.

From Morocco to Pakistan, one must draw the conclusion that an election is only democratic if the results are what the United States wants. In January 2007, Condoleezza Rice traveled once again to the Nile, where she praised America’s strategic partnership with Egypt — an admission of past failure and a rhetorical return to business as usual policies.

Possibly it’s a trick of history that the uprisings the neoconservatives dreamed of could be decisive up to now only in those nations supported by the West. That doesn’t make George W. Bush the driving force behind insurgencies, as Bush’s former Middle East advisor Elliot Abrams recently crowed.

For now, one can only say that as the rhetoric of the Bush administration is confirmed, so too is its realpolitik falsified. But the developments have shown that it’s still far too early to have a final verdict and an unqualified condemnation of Bush’s Middle East policies.