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posted March 14, 2005, updated 12:00 p.m.

Will 'Arab spring' lead to 'summer of liberty'?

Some experts worry US 'triumphalism' masks more complicated issues in push towards Arab democracy.

By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

Iraq's recent elections have been hailed as the catalyst for other 'democratic' developments in the Middle East. But some experts now say that democracy advocates need to be careful not to overstate what will in the long run be a difficult push towards regional liberty. A key factor will be how the US responds to what will emerge as native 'Arab democracy.' In the past when the US has talked about 'true democracy' in other regions in the past, it has not always acted in democracy's interests when it might jeopardize US interests.

Thomas Carothers, director of the Carnegie Endowment Program on Law and Democracy, and former Reagan-era State Department official, writes in his new book, " Critical Mission: Essays on Democracy Promotion," that what is now taking place in the Middle East echoes cold-war efforts.


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"Where democracy appears to fit in well with US security and economic interests, the United States promotes democracy," Carothers concludes. "Where democracy clashes with other significant interests, it is downplayed or even ignored."

Mr. Carothers, who believes democracy can come to the Middle East under the right conditions, also notes that "democracy promotion is hurt by the habitual tendency of its practitioners toward overstatement."

The Associated Press observed recently in an analysis piece, in a region where " the mosque holds more sway than political leaders," truly democratic elections could result in more, not fewer, Islamist governments strongly opposed to the US.

Cornell's Fredrik Logevall, an expert on American foreign policy, ... noted that even in Iraq – which the United States has painted as the model for democratic reforms – the Bush administration was initially reluctant to hold early elections 'because it was concerned about who would win.'
'My sense in 2003 is that if they could have had a soft dictatorship under (former Pentagon-backed Iraqi National Congress head Ahmed) Chalabi, they would have been as happy as can be,' he said, noting that U.S officials began pushing for an early national election only after Iraq's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, demanded such a vote.

The AP also notes that if "truly free" elections were held in Egypt, it might "translate into new power for the Muslim Brotherhood, a group known for its past violence but which now says it wants to achieve an Islamic state through democratic means. It has rallied the disenfranchised, unemployed and oppressed with the call: 'Islam is the solution.' "

Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer asks about how the US would respond if, for instance, the Lebanese elections, scheduled to be held this spring, result in the "Islamist, anti-Israel" Hizbullah emerging as " one of the major winners."

But would the president accept election results in other Arab countries if anti-American Islamists prove to be a strong political force? Liberal democrats are a marginal group in most Mideast countries, and Islamists have strong public support in countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia - and Syria. Representative Arab politics will evolve only when those societies work through their own political contradictions and all factions accept democratic rules.
This will not happen soon, and the process may not be pretty. Arab publics will be watching to see whether President Bush lives up to his own message and accepts the path of Arab democracy - wherever it leads.

Writing last Thursday in the Guardian, left-wing columnist Seumas Milne also points to Lebanon, arguing that the "first decisive rebuff" to " this fairy tale of spin" about democracy came last week when half a million people marched in Beirut in support of Syria and Hizbullah. Mr. Milne writes that last week's protest "exposed the rottenness at the core of what calls itself a 'pro-democracy' movement in Lebanon."

The anti-Syrian protests, dominated by the Christian and Druze minorities, are not in fact calling for a genuine democracy at all, but for elections under the long-established corrupt confessional carve-up, which gives the traditionally privileged Christians half the seats in parliament and means no Muslim can ever be president.
As if to emphasise the point, one politician championing the anti-Syrian protests, Pierre Gemayel of the rightwing Christian Phalange party (whose militiamen famously massacred 2,000 Palestinian refugees under Israeli floodlights in Sabra and Shatila in 1982), recently complained that voting wasn't just a matter of majorities, but of the "quality" of the voters. If there were a real democratic election, Gemayel and his friends could expect to be swept aside by a Hizbullah-led government.

Even for conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe, who, unlike Milne, finds the recent developments in the Arab world "gratifying," the " triumphalism makes me uneasy. This is the Middle East we're talking about, after all. And we have been here before."

It is being called an 'Arab Spring,' and Bush's critics, many of whom snorted when he insisted last year that 'freedom is on the march,' are right to give him credit for helping to bring it about. What his allies need to bear in mind is that cracks in the ice of tyranny and misrule don't always lead to liberation.
In 1989, a global wave of democratic fervor brought tens of millions of anti-Communist demonstrators into the streets. In Eastern Europe, that wave shattered the Berlin Wall, freed the captive nations, and eventually ended the Cold War. In China, by contrast, it was stopped by the tanks of Tiananmen.Square and the spilling of much innocent blood. In history, unlike in nature, spring is not always followed by summer.

Mr. Jacoby says that there will be "enough time for gloating" if the Arab spring does turn into a more liberal and democratic summer.

Finally, if democracy does bloom soon in the Middle East, British foreign secretary Jack Straw says there will be others who have helped to create the right conditions along with US president George Bush – specifically, the Al Jazeera satellite cable network, which has broadcast images of pro-democratic street protests to the Arab world, and the Palestinian leadership.

MSNBC, reporting on how technology is spreading the message of democracy in the Middle East, notes that the "greatest irony is images of democracy are now being spread by the very same Arab networks the White House once criticized for broadcasting threats from Osama bin Laden."