Does democracy lead to the end of terrorism?
The Bush administration says it does, but experts are increasingly doubtful.
The Bush administration has pushed ahead with its idea that bringing democracy to the Middle East will lead to a state of affairs where, as the President put it recently, "
extremists will be marginalized and the flow of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow and eventually end."
Increasingly, however, foreign policy experts, commentators, and even US military commanders on the ground in Iraq are starting to doubt that this is true. The
Los Angeles Times reported last week that some senior US officials
no longer believe that establishing democracy in Iraq "can erode and ultimately eradicate the insurgency gripping the country."
Even as millions of Iraqis voted in the recent constitutional referendum, these officials are concerned that the quest for democracy in Iraq, at least in its current form, could actually strengthen the insurgency. Experts on the Middle East agree.
"The democratic process as it has worked so far has certainly done nothing to undermine the insurgency," said Nathan Brown, who researches Middle East political reform at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
Robert Malley, co-author of a September report by the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organization that deals with conflict resolution, concluded that approval of the draft constitution could make things worse. Malley called the administration's Iraq policy "a case study of pinning too much hope on an electoral process without doing so much of the other work."
In an article in the September/October issue of
Foreign Affairs, F. Gregory Gause III, associate professor of political science at the University of Vermont and director of its Middle East studies program, asks, "Is the security rationale for promoting democracy in the Arab world
based on a sound premise?" His answer is no.
Although what is known about terrorism is admittedly incomplete, the data available do not show a strong relationship between democracy and an absence of or a reduction in terrorism. Terrorism appears to stem from factors much more specific than regime type. Nor is it likely that democratization would end the current campaign against the United States. Al Qaeda and like-minded groups are not fighting for democracy in the Muslim world; they are fighting to impose their vision of an Islamic state. Nor is there any evidence that democracy in the Arab world would "drain the swamp," eliminating soft support for terrorist organizations among the Arab public and reducing the number of potential recruits for them. Mr. Gause argues that it is time to reexamine the push for democracy promotion in the Arab world (an idea promoted by officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, as well as by journalists such as New York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman), and instead focus on "encouraging the development of secular, nationalist, and liberal political organizations that could compete on an equal footing with Islamist parties." This is the one way, he writes, that the US can help ensure that when elections do occur, they do not lead to the election of Islamist governments who are deeply opposed to the US, but ones where their interests are more in line with those of the West.
In her book, "
Terror in the Name of God," Jessica Stern has argued that "democratization is not necessarily the best way to fight Islamic extremism," because the transition to democracy "has been found to be an especially vulnerable period for states across the board." And the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram wrote Sunday that the research of Robert Pape of the University of Chicago shows that "
the desire to expel foreign occupying forces is the principal catalyst of suicide terrorism campaigns over the past two decades."
He found that what virtually all suicide terrorist campaigns have in common is the specific and strategic goal to compel the adversary to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Time and again, the tactic has proven effective ...
Surprisingly, Pape discovered that most suicide terrorists were actually secular in orientation. However, he found that religion did indeed play an important factor when the religions of the occupied community and the occupier differ.
The
Los Angeles Times also notes that some Iraqi politicians are worried that the US is "sacrificing a unifying political process in favor of speed and arbitrary deadlines needed to sustain American public support for the war and justify the politically important reduction in US troop levels in Iraq."
Also...
•
A Word Lost... Between Two Languages (
Dar Al Hayat)
•
Judge attacks 'fairy tale' over Iraq war (
Daily Telegraph)
•
Mix of nationalism, zealotry and humiliation drives rising suicide attacks (
Associated Press
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Tom Regan
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