Hamas, Iraq, and the Spirit of Democracy
Reconcilable Differences
Two Conways, Two Takes
George's Take
It is simply mystifying that so many observers found Hamas's electoral triumph so surprising. The event may be awful and sad, but it was easily foreseeable. It's not at all complicated. The Palestinian people overwhelmingly support terrorism. They support terrorism not just against Jews, but as a recent poll (discussed here) shows, they are big fans of al Qaeda's attacks against Americans, and support attacks even against Europeans, who are much less favorably disposed toward Israel than we. And if it is terror that the Palestinians like, then why shouldn't they vote for the best terrorists on the ballot? Which is exactly what they did. If Osama bin Laden had been running, he probably would have won too. That's democracy for you — the people get what they want, for better or for worse, for good or for evil.
There is nothing good, certainly nothing predictably positive, about Hamas's victory. The President tried much too hard in his press conference yesterday to put a positive spin on it. Yes, to his credit, he emphasized "that a political party that articulates the destruction of Israel as part of its platform is a party with which [the United States] will not deal." But the President also suggested, referring to the vote that elected Hamas, that maybe it was "healthy" because it rebuked the corrupt Fatah, and that "liberty" was spreading:
I remind people, the elections — democracy is — can open up the world's eyes to reality by listening to people. And the elections — the election process is healthy for society, in my judgment. In other words, it's — one way to figure out how to address the needs of the people is to let them express themselves at the ballot box. And that's exactly what happened yesterday. And you'll hear a lot of people saying, well, aren't we surprised at the outcome, or this, that, or the other.
If there is corruption, I'm not surprised that people say, let's get rid of corruption. If government hadn't been responsive, I'm not the least bit surprised that people said, I want government to be responsive.
And so that was an interesting day yesterday in the — as we're watching liberty begin to spread across the Middle East.
This rhetoric is rather too much to bear. We didn't see anything "healthy" this week, and we didn't watch "liberty" spread this week. Not at all. We watched a group of murderous thugs win a plebiscite over a group of somewhat less violent thieves. This was a vote for suicide bombers. Nothing more, nothing less. Daniel Pipes put it well earlier in the week, before the results were known:
An increasing number of voices are calling for Hamas to be recognized, arguing that the imperatives of governance would tame it, ending its arch-murderous vocation (it has killed about 600 Israelis) and turning it into a responsible citizen.
Even President Bush made this argument in early 2005: “There's a positive effect when you run for office. Maybe some will run for office and say, ‘Vote for me, I look forward to blowing up America.'. . . I don't think so. I think people who generally run for office say, ‘Vote for me, I'm looking forward to fixing your potholes, or making sure you got bread on the table.'”
The historical record, however, refutes this “pothole theory of democracy.” Mussolini made the trains run, Hitler built autobahns, Stalin cleared the snow and Castro reduced infant mortality — without any of these totalitarians giving up their ideological zeal nor their grandiose ambitions. Likewise, Islamists in Afghanistan, Iran and Sudan have governed without becoming tamed. If proof is needed, note the Iranian efforts to build nuclear weapons amid an apocalyptic fervor.
Undoubtedly the President's remarks yesterday came from force of recent habit. Thanks to the Iraq war, the Administration has become somewhat addicted to rhetoric about the virtues of democracy in the Middle East, rhetoric that sometimes verges on the Pollyannaish. We didn't find those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which means that maybe Saddam wasn't quite as dangerous to us as we had thought, and with the expansion of the insurgency into the vacuum left by Saddam's defeat, the mission turned out not to have been quite as accomplished as we thought. So the Administration has played up an alternative rationale for the war: it is bringing democracy to the people of Iraq, and that's going to make it all worthwhile for them, for us and for the world. On the banks of the Tigris will rise a parliamentary government that will shine as a beacon of liberty over all the lands of Islam.
We should all hope — we should all fervently pray — that this revolutionary vision turns out to be true. So far, though, the results are mixed, and they're likely to be mixed, at best, for a very long time. The Iraqi people are unquestionably better off today, having been freed from yoke of Saddam. Whether they stay better off depends on their ability to learn to abide by the rule of law, something that they may or may not learn to do. The mullahs next door in Iran may be better off, because now they are freer than ever to expand their influence westward. The terrorists in Iraq may think they are better off, because freedom from Saddam for them means the freedom to bomb. So far, as the Administration's policy effectively concedes, the United States isn't better off. The Administration has made quite a compelling case that, if our troops left Iraq today, it would be unquestionably a foreign-policy disaster, a categorical victory for terrorists who weren't active there until we got there. The United States may someday be better off as a result of the war in Iraq, if democracy takes firm root there, which it may or may not do. And if democracy does take root there, it may take years to do so. That seems to be the prevailing view among our soldiers, many of whom believe (see question 9 of this poll) that it may take an American military presence in Iraq through 2010, 2015, or even beyond for our nation's goals in Iraq to be achieved. Even if those goals are someday achieved, we will still be faced with the question of whether the benefits achieved for our national security will have justified the cost — human, economic, budgetary, and political — of such a lengthy trial, and whether the goal of fighting terror might have been more effectively accomplished by focusing our efforts somewhere else in the first place. Whatever the ultimate outcome in Iraq, we are at the mercy of a nascent political process that we can try to influence but ultimately cannot control.
Hamas's victory, and the long and dangerous mission facing our troops in Iraq, teach the same painful lesson: we should not allow our fondness for sonorous oratory about the virtues of democracy to substitute for sober realism about the Middle East, its angry peoples, and its treacherous politics. Democracy is good, but it doesn't always stick, and it doesn't always mean peace. One of the soundest things ever said about Western democracy was Churchill's famous dictum: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Churchill was speaking to the parliament of a democracy that had been nearly three-quarters of a millennium in the making. He wasn't speaking of a part of the world that has never really known true democratic self-government and the rule of law, lands where attempts at democracy could easily turn out as noxious, and maybe more so, as what preceded them. Even if Churchill's line applies to the Middle East, the fact that democracy might be the worst system but for what came before it does not say very much. And it might not do us any good at all.
conways.nationalreview.com |
