Jordan's Democracy Option
By Jackson Diehl - Op Ed
Washington Post
Sunday, September 21, 2003; Page B07
Potentates of the Middle East usually confine their non-official meetings in Washington to friendly business leaders or think-tankers. So when Jordan's King Abdullah launched his visit here last week with a breakfast for democracy and human rights activists, it was worth listening in.
The first question, from Freedom House, was about imprisoned journalists. Amnesty International asked about reports of torture. Others wanted to know about "honor killings" of women, international monitoring of future elections and reforms of the judiciary.
Abdullah, a 41-year-old graduate of Oxford and Georgetown, didn't contest any of the charges. He asked Amnesty for details "that will allow me to attack" the torture cases. He conceded his judiciary "was at square one" for professionalism and independence, that he was "ashamed" of the killings of women and that his first steps toward a freer media had been ineffective. He lamented the lack of political maturity in his newly elected parliament.
All that, promised the king, is going to change. "I know we have a long way to go," he told the group. "But we are at the beginning of a new stage in terms of democracy and freedom. If we are successful, if we can get our act together, we can be an agent other [Arabs] can use" to press for political liberalization.
The Bush administration's idea of a democratic transformation in the Middle East is still the object of general skepticism, if not ridicule, in Washington. Yet Abdullah is one of several Arab rulers who claim they believe in it -- who argue, in fact, that it must happen. "The leadership of the Middle East don't understand that 50 percent of the population is under 18, and if they don't get going to create some means for real political participation for these young people, they are going to have serious problems," he said.
The king's calculations are not only demographic, of course. Aides say he is preparing for the possibility that the U.S. mission in Iraq will succeed and that sometime in the next year an elected government will take power in Baghdad. Jordan, a resource-poor country increasingly dependent on trade concessions and aid from the United States, can't afford a fall from favor; so its strategy is to join Iraq as a regional model for reform. Or, at least, to promise such change to Washington.
Since the toppling of Saddam Hussein, such pledges also have been offered by the rulers of Qatar, Bahrain and even Saudi Arabia -- though so far, there has been little real change on the ground. Jumping on the liberalization bandwagon, or claiming to, is only one of several responses Arab regimes are toying with as the shock waves from Iraq continue to roll across them, as I saw in a visit to the region this month.
One approach is to embrace Iraqi democracy; another is to quietly smother it. At the Arab League meeting in Cairo this month, the region's autocrats cast themselves as joining with Iraq's unelected governing council in demanding "an end to the occupation." Like France, the Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak says it would like to see sovereignty handed over to the Iraqis within weeks and U.S. troops withdrawn by next spring. That wouldn't leave time for elections -- which, for Mubarak's entrenched autocracy, is exactly the point.
Arab governments "are not concerned about the success or failure of the U.S. in Iraq," Egypt's veteran national security adviser, Osama Baz, bluntly told me and several other visiting journalists over dinner in Cairo. "They are worried about the consequences for themselves." Don't expect Egypt, Baz said, to supply troops or police to help its nominal American ally. On the other hand, he added, "we can help with the drafting of a constitution. We can help strengthen the governing council and the bureaucracy."
Egypt is betting, in other words, that ultimately it will be easier for Arab states than the United States to reshape Iraq. "You can't export the American system of democracy all over the world," Baz said pointedly. Abdullah, too, is tempted to meddle: Much of his private pitch to the Bush administration was an appeal for Iraq's minority but long-ruling Sunni population -- and a broadside at Ahmed Chalabi, the Shiite leader and Pentagon favorite who was once charged with bank fraud in Jordan. Jordanian officials insist that Chalabi is working to poison Jordanian-Iraqi relations; they even claimed to have evidence linking Chalabi to the bombing of the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad.
There may not be much the Bush administration can do about Mubarak, who, Egypt's democratic dissidents say, will ally himself with Islamic militants before he agrees to political liberalization. But if Washington can convince leaders such as Abdullah that it is serious about democracy in Iraq, the liberal agendas being advertised in Washington just might get implemented at home.
"We can be an Ireland, we can be a Switzerland -- I don't think that's farfetched," King Abdullah told the pro-democracy crowd. Surely they agreed when he added: "To achieve that, we have to make these changes."
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