Restoration of Democracy

I trust that George W. Bush and his friends will spend the next few years explaining how wonderfully this presidency has led the world, despite terrorist threats, fearful Europeans and leftist rogues, who, when it came to the crunch, were always birds of a feather.

I find this interesting reading. But today’s and tomorrow’s questions will not be answered with Bush’s historic vision. Obama will have to settle these and he will need to distance himself from them. In some areas, this may mean a revolution as far as the West is concerned.

A few weeks ago, I quoted a recently published book, ”A Path Out of the Desert: a Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East,” by Kenneth M. Pollack. As a longtime official of the CIA, he knows the region well and is now director of an institute that deals with the problems of the region. He is a realist. He sees the two main goals of U.S. policy in the region as being the guarantee of oil flow and the security of Israel. Foreign policy under Bush has been counterproductive, he writes. One of the most important reasons is that policy makers failed to understand the Arab worldview. And the same goes for Afghanistan.

The root cause of all difficulties is the inherent instability typical of Muslim states. They have nothing to do with nations that are, in a Western sense, perfectionists, with democratically arrived public opinion, reasonable average prosperity, employment opportunity, amusement, and all things that we, on this side of the planet, have come to regard as our natural right. Within half a century, the population the Middle East grew from 78.8 to 375 million. Unemployment in the region is the highest in the world. Most cities have huge slums, and city planning is almost non-existent. Education is religious-authoritarian. Democracy, in a Western sense, is out of the question. Furthermore, these countries with their proletarian populations are no match against globalization. This also applies to oil-rich countries.

Openly, or deep in their souls, the majority of these millions are anti- Western, perhaps even since the Crusades, and in this century, as seen from our perspective, it has not improved. When the World Trade Center towers collapsed, there was cheering in many Arab cities. In 2003, Americans began liberating Iraq. Whether Saddam Hussein was a bad guy is not appropriate for discussion. But, six years later, is Iraq the model state that Bush had envisioned? Remember the shoe. And even the outgoing president Bush himself now admits that the [Iraqi] operation was not a complete success. In the Arab world feelings of gratitude toward the West have, as a result, not been strengthened.

We now are witness to the next stage in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Let’s for a moment set aside the question of who is right. It is, of course, not appropriate for Hamas to randomly fire rockets into Israel, even though the one and a half million Palestinians in Gaza did not go there of their own free will, but went as refugees in 1948. Israel defends itself. Within a couple of weeks, this has cost about eight hundred Palestinian lives. Will anyone believe that through this counteraction one single Arab has acquired more understanding, or let alone, sympathy for the West? Has Israel become safer because of the 2006 war against Hezbollah? Is the civilian population better off? Has the image of the West improved?

The origin of all problems in the region stems from the fact that most countries there are comparatively backwards, while the ruling elites will not or cannot bring about change. Slowly, then, grows a pre-revolutionary state of affairs that is exploited by fundamentalists. Asymmetric war is discovered. This actually might have started in 1978 with the hostage taking in the American embassy in Tehran that lasted almost three months. A rescue attempt failed. Al-Qaeda recruits its terrorists in Saudi Arabia, while members of the royal family are best friends with the Bush family. Then comes 9/11, followed by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. There, the asymmetric war continues to develop with suicide attacks and roadside bombs. The West sends armies of hundreds of thousands, but it does not help. Soon there may be an additional thirty thousand Americans sent to Iraq. And who knows, even some Dutch. (We do not know which minister to believe: Van Middelkoop or Verhagen.)

Enter Obama as president. In his election campaign, he said that he was willing to speak with his Iranian colleague Ahmadinedjad, rather than immediately threaten to bomb Iranian nuclear installations. Afghanistan’s president, Karzai proposed last year starting a discussion with the Taliban. During the Cold War, meetings between the two arch enemies were routine diplomacy. Under the previous president, talks with adversaries were taboo. This prohibition has not solved anything; rather, it has only widened divisions. Obama confronts the task of changing a political and diplomatic culture. This cannot succeed while waging a dead-end war.