http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/stor ... ryID=13763
While optimists could still be proved correct and the removal of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein could strengthen moderating elements in the Islamic world, early trends indicate that the war has wounded the cause of moderation. During the war, images of destruction of the historic capital of Islam's caliphs, Baghdad, were beamed into Muslim homes by a vibrant and increasingly independent Arab media. For hours on end, viewers saw the suffering of their fellow Muslims pounded by an all-powerful United States. The looting that followed was seen as the result of the occupying army's disregard for the security of the Iraqi people. The burning of the Iraqi Religious Affairs Ministry, which housed the oldest extant copies of the Muslim holy book, the Koran, strengthened the argument of anti-American clerics that the United States does not respect Muslim concerns. Almost nobody in the Muslim world noted that the looters were fellow Muslim Iraqis and not American or British soldiers.
The war in Iraq has definitely increased the number of radical Muslims believing in the inevitability of a clash of civilizations and the need to stand up and be counted for their religious fellowship. Radical Islamists have started building the argument that the United States offers nothing by way of ethical ideas and has become arrogant as a result of its military dominance. This argument finds even greater resonance in the context of the Iraq war. What is new following the collapse of Iraq's secular Arab nationalist regime is a process of cooperation and convergence between radical Islamists and secular nationalists in the Middle East. Traditionally, secular Arab nationalism viewed radical Islam, with its emphasis on pan-Islamism, as an ideological rival. But the Iraq war has muted that rivalry and, in the process, has accentuated the polarization between a Muslim ";us" and a Western ";them."
The convergence of secular and fundamentalist Muslim radicals could provide new sanctuaries to radical Islamists while creating operational links between ideologically opposed terrorist groups. It could also pave the way for admission of secular enemies of the United States into groups that operate through their network of mosques and seminaries. More secular recruits would enable radical Islamist networks to overcome their relative lack of knowledge of Western societies, strengthening their operational capabilities.
U.S. promises of building an Iraqi democracy and making a new beginning in the Middle East have not been taken seriously by an overwhelming majority in the Arab Islamic world. In polls in several Arab countries, a majority of respondents now say they are unlikely to change their view of the United States, even if it helps to create a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Few people in the Muslim world liked Saddam. But the Muslim world saw the war largely as an effort to occupy Iraq, not one to liberate it.
Muslim disappointment and anger toward the U.S. government has been growing for some time, not least due to perceptions that the United States is one-sided in its supposedly mediating role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The problem is getting worse. Televised images of blindfolded prisoners in chains on Guantánamo and post–September 11 violations of civil liberties of ordinary Muslims in the United States have contributed to Muslim anti-Americanism. Rightly or wrongly, many Muslims feel that the United States manipulated and falsified evidence and arguments to go to war against Iraq but would have deemed a Muslim state a dangerous rogue if it did the same thing. In Muslim eyes, it is as if Washington is stooping to the same level as its declared enemies.
None of these negative developments may be significant in the long run if Iraqi reconstruction works out according to plan, a workable deal materializes between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and no new wars are fought to root out radical Islamic terrorists. As optimists note, anti-Americanism has spiked and fallen before in the Muslim world. Some U.S. neoconservatives, in particular, insist that the Arab-Islamic world has never been receptive to Western idealism, but fears and respects force. If this assertion is true, the decisive military victory in Iraq will soon quash agitation in the Muslim Street.
But an empire built on force and without support or admiration of its subjects remains vulnerable to the kind of threat represented by terrorist movements. The American public has traditionally shown little appetite for empire or for protracted conflict. Moreover, Israel's experience in the West Bank and Gaza, and Russia's in Chechnya, disproves the theory that overwhelming force can temper the fervor of radical Muslims.
For obvious reasons, the United States wants to bolster popular Muslim moderates and marginalize radicals. And there is a long tradition of Muslim leaders looking up to the West. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, told a peasant who asked him what westernization meant: ";It means being a better human being." Pakistan's founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, cited the Englishman's sense of justice and fair play as the value that binds Muslims with Westerners and sought to emulate U.S. conduct toward Canada in his country's foreign policy. Even the religiously conservative founder of Saudi Arabia, King Abdel Aziz, chose to ally himself with the United States because he found God-fearing Americans better than godless communists.
But finding today's Ataturks or Jinnahs is not so easy. And moderates who appeal to the West may fail to win enough hearts and minds at home. Until now the United States has defined Muslim leaders furthering U.S. foreign policy objectives as ";moderates." It should now widen that definition to include those able to win democratic support at home by focusing on their people's problems.
Despite widespread predictions that the march of American forces into Baghdad would unleash either a wave of democratization or a plague of protest and repression throughout the Middle East, the more prosaic reality is that most Middle Eastern states are too preoccupied with their own domestic problems to be moved profoundly by events in Iraq. Indeed, the region seems likely to experience political evolutions rather than revolutions, small steps forward (or back) rather than sudden leaps into a new world of Middle Eastern democracy or brutal retreats to dictatorship.
Iraq's main impact on the region will be political. The creation of a durable democracy will strengthen reformists and thus encourage more political liberalization. But if democratization provokes conflicts between Kurds, Sunnis, and the dominant Shiites (60 percent of Iraq's population), or if it produces a new Shiite theocracy, rulers from Rabat to Tehran will point to Iraq as good reason to avoid political reform.
The possibility of ethno-religious conflict highlights Iraq's psychological importance in the region. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's rule showed that when ethnic, tribal, religious, or secular segments of society cannot peacefully resolve their differences, a strongman can at least repress them. And for all Saddam's exceptional brutality, autocrats throughout the Middle East have also used his model of trying to ";resolve” identity conflicts by imposing order from above. If Iraq's new leaders learn to address such conflicts democratically, they will not only achieve more stable results, but their example could then inspire proponents of ethno-religious accommodation everywhere.
Iraq's neighbors are watching the dramatic reemergence of the country's Shiite majority to see whether it will learn to tolerate diverse views and cooperate with the Sunni and Kurdish communities, or whether it will instead be authoritarian and intolerant. Radical Shiite clerics may be a minority, but because they are organized, they might impose their views on the wider Shiite community. The radicals know that Najaf, historically the most important Shiite city, will eventually reemerge as a center of Shiite scholarship. If they dominate this dynamic, the radicals will inspire fundamentalists everywhere. But if Najaf becomes a center of religious pluralism, advocates of a more tolerant Islam, particularly among the Arab world's Shiites, will take heart.
As a neighboring state where Shiites hold sway, Iran is key to the course of this transition. Well before the Iraq war began, some of Iran's radical clerics expressed happiness about an American-led campaign. They assumed that it would inadvertently bolster Iraq's radical clerics and thus create a new regional ally for Iran's own hard-liners. To fill the postwar vacuum before more moderate voices could organize, Iran sent Revolutionary Guardsmen to Iraq immediately after Saddam's fall. Iran's reformists, on the other hand, hope that Iraq's moderate clerics will survive and establish a base in national politics, minimizing the effective convergence of radicals in Iran and Iraq and thus strengthening the political leverage of Iran's own moderates. Still, given the divisions among the reformists and the entrenched power of the security establishment and conservative judiciary, the most feasible positive outcome in Iran would be a protracted and bumpy liberalization, even if Iraq's moderate Shiites prevail.
In turn, all Arab states with significant Shiite populations will take cues from events in Iraq: Bahrain's Shiite majority is ruled by a Sunni monarchy. Many Shiites were disappointed with the reforms initiated by the monarch and boycotted the semicompetitive elections of October 2002. A radical clerical victory in Iraq would embolden those Bahraini Shiites who accuse the king of promoting a fake democracy. Conversely, a pluralistic Iraq might promote an accommodation between the regime and the opposition that makes further liberalization possible.
In Kuwait, relations between Sunnis and Shiites are more cordial, in part because Kuwait's Shiites constitute an influential community (some 30 percent) that has representation in the parliament. With Iraq no longer a threat, the authority of Kuwait's parliament might increase. But if Shiite radicalism prevails or provokes internal conflict in Iraq, tensions will rise between Kuwait's Shiite community and the royal family, and between Sunni and Shiite members of parliament, thus diminishing the parliament's influence.
Saudi Arabia's royal family has announced a reform program that will enhance the authority of the unelected Consultation Council. Inspired by events in Iraq, Saudi's small Shiite minority is clamoring for more rights. Saudi reformists may address these demands, but they will be careful not to antagonize the conservative Wahhabi establishment. If Shiite radicals prevail in Iraq, it is difficult to imagine any meaningful political reform in Saudi Arabia.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah's authority as spokesmen for the Shiites will be enhanced regardless of whether Iraq emerges as a democracy or a theocracy. Either way, the ties between Lebanese and Iraqi Shiites will be reinvigorated. Yet how Hezbollah projects its influence at home and abroad, particularly in Israel, will depend heavily on Syria. If the Bush administration convinces Syria to stop backing Hezbollah, space might open up for a more moderate Shiite leadership in Lebanon. But the prospects for such moderation will depend heavily on a revival of the Arab-Israeli peace process, since only a comprehensive peace that includes Syria will give Damascus cause to rein in Hezbollah.
Elsewhere in the Arab world, events in Iraq will be less significant, although hardly irrelevant. In Jordan, the paralysis of the peace process, rising Islamist passions, and economic crisis have prompted King Abdullah to reverse an earlier political liberalization. A resumption of trade with Iraq and, even more, the creation of a pluralistic regime in Baghdad, will set the stage for the holding of elections in Jordan, which as of this writing had been postponed twice. But if Iraq fragments or if radical Shiite clerics triumph, the king will carefully manage these and any elections to ensure that Iraq's malaise does not spread southward.
Egypt's leaders knew that the creation of a pro-Western Iraq would undermine Egypt's geo-strategic position. They have pushed to accelerate economic reform and to reinvigorate the semiofficial National Democratic Party. President Hosni Mubarak and his allies are determined to ensure the state's control over all further political reforms.
Further west, Iraq becomes less relevant. Algeria is still recovering from civil war and is unlikely to move much beyond its state of fragmentation. As for Morocco, until the recent terrorist bombings in Casablanca, further political liberalization seemed in the offing. But the pace is likely to slow, especially if the government senses that the rising power of mainstream Islamists is serving as a cover for radical Islamism.
Such reforms are unlikely to produce fully competitive democratic regimes. What we have in much of the Arab world are semiauthoritarian ";liberalized autocracies." Such regimes allow for a measure of pluralism and political competition that they then use to prevent a wholesale democratization of the political system. Even if a Jeffersonian democracy emerges in Baghdad, Arab rulers will not forgo the benefits of such mixed regimes any time soon.
For Arab states to contemplate moving beyond the old ";liberalization game" would require a climate of regional stability that discredits Islamist extremism. Success in Iraq will help, but real political reform hinges on a comprehensive solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict that allows for an independent Palestinian state living in peace with Israel. The Bush administration has endorsed the Middle East road map for peace;a document that envisions the establishment of an independent Palestinian state by 2005. But will Bush take the kinds of domestic political risks for Palestinian-Israeli peace that he was ready to run for Iraqi freedom and democracy? If he doesn't, even the sweetest political victory in Iraq won't inspire the kinds of political changes in the wider Middle East for which the president and his advisors have hoped.
