Symposium: The Case for Democracy
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 4, 2005
Here at Frontpagemag.com, we consider Natan Sharansky's The Case for Democracy to be the most important book of our time. We had the privilege and honor of interviewing this titan and hero about his book just recently here at Frontpagemag.com.
President Bush’s recent second inaugural and State of the Union addresses were clearly based on Mr. Sharansky's basic precepts.
Without doubt, the successful Iraqi elections powerfully confirm Sharansky’s main thesis that freedom is intoxicating and that it can penetrate any society or culture. But some skeptics remain; they have serious reservations about whether the Islamic-Arab world can truly democratize. To discuss this most crucial question with us today, we are joined by three distinguished guests:
Christopher Hitchens, one of the most prominent political and cultural essayists of our time. He is the author of a new collection of his essays: Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays.
Ron Dermer, the co-author of The Case For Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror.
and
P. David Hornik, a freelance writer and translator living in Jerusalem who has been contributing recently to Frontpagemag.com, the American Spectator Online, the Jerusalem Post, the Jewish Press, and Israeli news-views sites. He generated the skepticism regarding Sharansky’s thesis that paved the foundation for this symposium.
FP: Christopher Hitchens, Ron Dermer and David Hornik, welcome to Frontpage Symposium. It is a pleasure to have you here.
Mr. Hornik, let’s begin with you.
First and foremost, we are very grateful to you for contributing the critical questions that gave life to this symposium -- and, therefore, which provided the foundation for an open and free discussion on all the crucial themes connected to an issue that, well, just might be the most important of the 21st Century.
The Iraqi elections are something that we are all (aside from the Left and other tyranny-lovers) enthusiastically celebrating. Some 70% of Iraqis defied the terrorists and chose liberty over tyranny, nihilism and despair.
I think this inspiring development clearly legitimizes Sharansky’s arguments and reminds us of how crucial it is -- in the Reagan tradition – to support dissidents and freedom fighters throughout the totalitarian world, and in this case, in the Islamic-Arab world especially.
The support of freedom fighters was crucial in winning the Cold War -- and it will be crucial if we want to win World War IV.
Yet Mr. Hornik, you have voiced some reservations about Sharansky’s (and Ron Dermer’s) main proposition. You are not convinced that all societies will, ultimately, choose freedom over fear and, therefore, liberty over tyranny.
Before we turn to the Iraqi elections and what they signify, let’s first begin with the general theme.. What exactly are your reservations Mr. Hornik?
Hornik: Thanks Jamie.
Let me start with an anecdote. From 1948 to 1950 an Egyptian teacher and freelance writer named Sayeed Qutb, an admirer of the United States and the West, went to America to study educational curricula. What he saw there horrified him, and after his return to Egypt he became a leader of the radical Muslim Brotherhood. Qutb was appalled at what he considered sexual license in America, and particularly the male-female touching that he observed at a church dance.
One does not have to be a psychological genius to conjecture that much of what Qutb felt during his sojourn was fear. The degree of sexual freedom and equality that he observed in late-1940s America, the sight of women going around in “immodest” dress, working on jobs, mingling with men, and most of all the sexes having physical contact with each other in public, profoundly disconcerted him and threatened his belief system, his notion of the proper place of things.
All this is relevant to the message that Mr. Sharansky (along with Ron Dermer) has been propounding in his new book, in articles, in meetings with influential figures including President Bush, in an interview on this website last December 17, and so on. Sharansky’s message centers on a distinction between “fear societies”—dictatorships, and “free societies”—democracies. Sharansky’s insistence that all societies, given the choice, will choose “freedom” over “fear,” is the basis of his optimistic encouragement of the Bush administration’s ambition to spread democracy to the Arab world.
Not surprisingly, Sharansky’s paradigm of a fear society is the Soviet Union, whose dictatorship he heroically defied until being allowed to leave his Siberian prison cell for Israel in 1986. Yet his paradigm, as an instance of the transition from fear to freedom, is obviously problematic. Sharansky himself acknowledges this in his book:
In fact, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, the setbacks on the road to democracy today—some of which are very troubling—leave many doubtful that democracy there will stand the test of time. . . . But . . . compared to a Soviet Union in which millions worked for the KGB, millions were in prison, tens of millions lost their lives, and hundreds of millions lived in fear, present day Russia is a bastion of freedom. We must also remember that Russian democracy is in its infancy.
After a few more paragraphs in this vein, however, Sharansky reluctantly admits that this case remains open: “If the example of Russia leaves readers unconvinced, then Japan’s transition to democracy should quell any doubts . . . ”
In fact, Freedom House’s new ranking of Russia as “not free” for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union strengthens doubts rather than quells them. Freedom House points to increased Kremlin control over television and other media, restrictions on local government, and elections that are neither free nor fair. Even granting that the situation remains much better than in the dark days of the Soviet Union, today’s Russia is a weak reed on which to base Sharansky’s optimism.
To be sure, democracy has made great strides over the past century and has spread to places and cultures once deemed impenetrable by it. Still, a glance at the world warrants a “half-empty, half-full” caution more than it does a strident optimism. Russia is no longer free and China, while making progress toward economic liberalism, remains a dictatorship and a severe human rights abuser. Democracy has made only scant inroads in Africa and has a fragile hold in Indonesia that is threatened by Islamic radicalism. Mark Falcoff has written about Latin America:
[The] long season of democratic renewal has left a bitter taste in the mouths of many Latin American citizens. In a recent region-wide survey, nearly 55 percent responded that they would support a return to dictatorship if doing so would solve their personal economic problems. . . . There has been a strong reaction against market-based democratic reforms. . . . Along with nostalgia for strongmen decked out in epaulettes and brandishing swords, the dream of a nationalist-corporatist state . . . has likewise begun to reappear. . . . [T]he wretched performance of the elected leadership in much of the region has tarnished the whole notion of democratic governance.[2]
And a recent poll finding that 50 percent of Iraq’s Shi’ites—currently viewed as the pro-American camp in that country—say they favor theocracy rather than democracy as their country’s eventual form of government, clouds the optimists’ picture even further.
Perhaps what distorts Sharansky’s perspective is his focus on only a certain kind of fear—the fear of political persecution felt by people living in totalitarian societies. But there are other kinds of human fear. There is fear of the new, fear of threats to traditional values, fear of the undermining of centuries-old social structures—indeed, fear of freedom. Even if Sayeed Qutb’s metamorphosis into the leader of an anti-Western terror organization is an extreme case, it, too, is paradigmatic. The mid-20th century America to which Qutb reacted with such horror was quaintly conservative compared to today’s American and Western world with its Internet porn, topless beaches, sky-high divorce rates, and so on. To believe that this world can convert the Muslim-Arab Middle East to its ways takes, indeed, a strong dose of optimism.
As an Israeli I am uneasy about the message that one of my cabinet ministers, the admirable, influential Sharansky, is spreading both on the popular level and at the highest altitudes of power. His sanguine outlook embraces the whole Middle East, including Iraq and the Palestinian Authority, even at a time when realities on the ground in both places seem to rebuff optimism. Last November 25 in a Jerusalem Post op-ed, Sharansky posited four conditions that the Palestinians must meet to prove that they are democratizing—dismantling the refugee camps, ending anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic incitement, expanding economic opportunities, and fighting terror. If Sharansky was the one administering the test, I would trust him to do so responsibly. The trouble is that more general messages like the one Sharansky is purveying can encourage eager, impatient politicians into hasty, unwise moves that lead to further disaster.
FP: Mr. Dermer?
Dermer: Thanks Jamie.
One thing Mr. Hornik and I seem to have in common is a great respect for Natan Sharansky. I also share Mr. Hornik’s concern that Sharansky’s ideas, improperly understood, can “encourage eager, impatient politicians into hasty, unwise moves that lead to further disaster.” But I feel that Mr. Hornik has fallen prey to his own warning.
Mr. Hornik argues that The Case for Democracy focuses on the fear of political persecution when there are in fact many kinds of fear such as “fear of the new,” “fear of threats to traditional values,” and “fear of freedom.” Mr. Hornik is indeed right that there are many kinds of fears, but I am not sure why this is relevant to the argument made in The Case for Democracy.
The “fear society” of which Sharansky writes is based on an objective standard. Simply put, can someone in that society go to the town square and say what they want without fear of arrest, imprisonment or physical harm. If yes, than the society is free. If not, then it is a fear society. Sharansky explains in The Case for Democracy that a society that bans dissent will inevitably repress its own people and threaten its neighbors.
The subjective fears that Mr. Hornik points to are no doubt real in the minds of those who have them, but they have little to do with the dangers a government presents to its subjects and other countries. For example, while Mr. Qutb may have felt “fear” in mid-20th century America, that does not mean that America was then a fear society whose government posed a danger to its own citizens and the rest of the world. Similarly, the fact that Natan Sharansky was not afraid of his KGB jailers did not make the USSR any less of a fear society, any less repressive and any less of a danger to the world.
It is the failure to allow for political dissent that is the mark of tyranny. Sharansky’s argument is that given a choice between living in a free society and a fear society, the majority of every people will choose to live in a freedom. Sharansky says nothing about the precise form such a free society will take. Japan is a free society, yet it is very different than the United States. So too, India and Turkey, which both pass the “town-square” test, are not Western democracies. Free societies in the Arab world will no doubt reflect the unique cultural traditions and heritage of its people. They will reflect Arab “fears” and concerns as well as their hopes and aspirations.
As to Mr. Hornik’s point about Russia, I think that he unfairly portrays Sharansky’s views with some rather selective quoting. Sharansky does not, as Mr. Hornik argues, “reluctantly admit that the case of Russia remains open.” Rather, he argues that the example of Russia may not be enough to convince the skeptics, of which Mr. Hornik would no doubt include himself. The best summation of Sharansky’s views on present day Russia is actually in a paragraph that Hornik only partially quotes:
“But we should keep things in perspective. Compared to a Soviet Union in which millions worked for the KGB, millions were in prison, tens of millions lost their lives, and hundreds of millions lived in fear, present day Russia is a bastion of freedom. We must also remember that Russian democracy is in its infancy. Comparing it to mature democracies that are centuries in the making is misleading. Twelve years after a revolution occurred in France in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity, its people lived under a dictatorship. Did that mean that French society could not abide democracy? More than eighty years after the American Revolution, African-Americans were still slaves. Did the practice of slavery in the nineteenth century mean that Americans were incapable of building a democratic society? Surely, the fact that democratic societies are not built overnight is not evidence that they cannot be built at all.”
The road to democracy is never smooth and it can be quite long but as The Case for Democracy shows it is a road down which all peoples want and can travel.
FP: Mr. Hitchens?
Hitchens: Hornik's arguments seem to me somewhat circular - if the danger of anti-democratic and theocratic ideas were not so great, we wouldn't be having or needing this discussion - while Dermer's strike me as a little too Panglossian.
We should begin by noticing that this argument doesn't proceed in a linear fashion, in any society. Germany was a fairly well-evolved democracy before succumbing to the madness of fascism, and so were Austria and Italy. This also reminds us that there is no "gene", cultural or ethnic, for democratic and pluralist ideas. Nor is there any absolute connection between respect for democracy and respect for secularism and church-state separation. India, which has a good record of sustaining a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional democracy, succumbed briefly to dictatorship in the 1970s under the leadership of the supposedly secular-democratic party (and family) that had brought it to independence.
India is also worth bearing in mind for another reason. It has a Muslim population that is as large as, if not larger than, the population of Pakistan. There are many reasons for Muslim discontent in India: the continuing stalemate in Kashmir and the foul sectarian conduct of the BJP and some of its junior partners, culminating in the destruction of the Ayodya mosque and the appalling recent pogroms in Gujerat. However, Indian Muslims are not found among the membership of extremist Islamic sects. This must have something to do with the ability of Muslim voters to participate in Indian democracy and in Indian society (in the recent past, the President of India, the editor of The Times of India, the head of the Indian nuclear program AND the captain of the Indian cricket team have all been Muslim).
Approaching matters from another angle: a century ago the Kurds of the Ottoman empire were among the most feudally-dominated and tribally-minded of the subject populations. They cheerfully enlisted as surrogate killers when the Turks needed ruthless underlings to destroy and dispossess the Christian Armenians. But today, Iraqi Kurdistan is the outstanding self-generated success of regime-change, with at least the lineaments of a free press and judiciary, and an embryonic democracy. (It's usually not mentioned that the majority of Kurds are Sunni, though the influence of the mullahs among them is very much less than elsewhere).
Of course, some strains of Islam are explicitly totalitarian and declare themselves to be opposed to democracy on principle. The Wahhabi/Salafi tendencies are the best-known case in point: they state that the Koran is all that is needful and that all else is profane. However, such forces have been vanquished and crushed by fellow-Arabs (most noticeably in Algeria, where elections of a kind have also been held) and, while it may not be true that all Turks are democrats, an astonishingly large number of democrats are Turks. Of the democratically-elected parliamentarians in Europe who defend secular democracy against violent theocrats, an impressive number come from Muslim immigrant backgrounds.
Meanwhile, one of the most depressing and backward countries in Europe, still mired in religious and national myth and still largely run by crooks and fascists, is Serbia, which once imagined itself the defender of Christian civilisation against Islam...
Since the overdue removal of Saddam Hussein, and the extraordinary elections in Afghanistan, there have been unmistakeable signs of democratic and modernising tendencies in Syria, in Lebanon and in Iran. One cannot therefore capitulate to fatalism and say that Islamic societies are immune to the common human wish for a civilized, law-governed, open society. To that extent, Mr. Sharansky is quite right, and it is very moving to see that the ideas of Academician Sakharov can be promulgated and re-transmitted in this way. Sharansky was also quite correct in pointing out the authoritarian subtext of the so-called "Oslo accords", and would no doubt agree that Arab Palestinian members of the Knesset were demonstrating the virtues of democracy, often against considerable odds, even when many of them were Communists.
Many of those Palestinian leftists and democrats were and are Christian, which brings me to another point. The Muslim world, especially under Turkish rule, was often exemplary in its attitude to minorities. But the contemporary Arab world is not. The Berbers, the Copts, the Jews, the Kurds, the Maronites....it's an awful record, which we do nothing to improve when we unconsciously accept the claim that Iraq, say, is an Arab and Muslim state when it is, in reality, no more so than America is a white and Christian one.
The critical argument concerns the possibility, to put it no higher, of a "Reformation" within Islam. In one sense, this is unlikely, because - rather to its credit - Islam has no Papacy or clergy which can simply ordain a change of doctrine or a revision of faith. However, from Indonesia to Western Europe, there is a struggle over the interpretation of the religion and its book, and the adaptation of both to other cultures and to modernity in general. The "fit" between this and democratization is not by any means an exact one, because it very often happens that the "reformers", like our Puritan forebears, are more exacting in their religious zeal than some of the Islamic regimes that they seek to challenge. However, the process has at least begun, and the fanatics have fewer and fewer answers, which is why they employ ever-crueller and more stupid tactics. We must be ready at all times and in all ways to lend a hand in forwarding and encouraging this debate, which is why the nonsensically-named "war on terror" is actually a struggle, as an earlier Russian hero put it, "for your freedom - and ours".
Hornik: Mr. Dermer says that he and I "seem to" have a great respect for Natan Sharansky. I assure him that I do have great respect for him—not only as a hero of the past but also as a constructive Israeli leader at a time when unfortunately there aren't so many of them.
Mr. Dermer says that although Sayeed Qutb may have felt fear in mid-20th century America, that society was not a "fear society" in Natan Sharansky's sense of being a dictatorship. But that is exactly my point. Qutb, having lived up until then in the Egyptian dictatorship, found democratic America a lot scarier than Egypt. When he returned to Egypt, he didn't become a democratic reformer but, rather, an anti-Western radical. His case is paradigmatic in two senses. First, we know that many of the top jihadi terrorists are in fact people who spent time and were educated in Western countries—often considerably more time than Qutb spent in one; sometimes they have even grown up in one. Their experiences do not change them into democrats, but the opposite. Second, this reaction of fear and loathing toward the West is felt by large parts of Arab and Muslim populations. They see a radically liberal West and perceive it as a threat to their radically conservative way of life and religion. That's how the Islamic-fundamentalism movement got started. There is much more at play here than Sharansky's simplified fear/freedom paradigm of dictatorship and democracy.
Natan Sharansky, as Mr. Dermer points out, while admitting that Russia's record since the fall of the Soviet Union is not so great in terms of freedom, observes that the emergence of democracy can be very slow, can take decades or centuries. Fine—this does not "prove" that Russia or any of the world's other democracy-resistant cultures and countries will eventually take what we consider to be the right road. The Russian case remains open—it constitutes no kind of proof for the claim that peoples will always choose and achieve democracy and freedom in the long run. Moreover, the Soviet Union collapsed at a time when, by Sharansky's own account, relatively few Russians believed anymore in communism as an ideology. But to get back to the Muslim-Arab case, many of the people in that world continue to passionately believe in Islam, a centuries-old religion that stresses authority and a radically conservative way of life.
Of course, Russia could eventually turn out to be a success story, as could Arab countries. I said that the world today warrants a "half-full, half-empty" sort of caution rather than Mr. Sharansky's doctrinaire, simplified optimism. In that regard I have no objection to Mr. Hitchens's mentioning some of the more encouraging cases like the Muslim minority in India, Iraqi Kurdistan, or Turkey. I would also mention, though, that the Muslims in India do not have their own independent entity, that Iraqi Kurdistan still has only an "embryonic" democracy as Mr. Hitchens describes it, and that Turkish democratization has been achieved via, to a considerable extent, a forceful suppression of Islam, first by Ataturk and subsequently by the Turkish military. In addition, none of these cases are Arab. Mr. Hitchens mentions democratic and modernizing tendencies in Syria and Lebanon (as well as Iran). These tendencies are still weak and are found mainly among brave dissidents; both Syria and Lebanon are still under the dictatorial Assad thumb. In the past, Lebanon had already achieved some measure of freedom and pluralism; eventually, the Lebanese Muslims crushed the Christians with the help of their Syrian brethren, and that remains the prevailing reality today. As Mr. Hitchens mentions, the contemporary Arab world is not a shining example of tolerance. We can still hope for the best but the present picture gives no warrant for expectations of a near-term improvement.
If, like Natan Sharansky, I could have the privilege of talking with President Bush for an hour, I would tell him to keep fighting the war on terror but to go much slower on the democracy idea. The attempt to create democracy in Iraq has proved very bloody and costly; I hope it will still succeed, naturally, but the picture is worrisome. King Abdullah of Jordan is known to fear the emergence of a Shi'ite salient stretching from Iran to Lebanon. There is also no evidence that the Iraqi example is inspiring democratic flowers to bloom in the rest of the Arab world in any substantial way. And unlike Sharansky, who has apparently encouraged Bush to apply democratic "tests" to the Palestinian Authority, I would, if I could, tell the president to forget about democratization in the Palestinian Authority for the foreseeable future. Instead the issue, as George Will has pointed out and Steven Plaut had already mentioned several times, is de-Nazification, and this is also true to a large extent of the Arab world in general. One of the wonderful products of modernization in the Arab world is that populations are now treated to nightly spewings of anti-Semitic, anti-Israeli, and anti-American hate propaganda on Arab television stations. We are talking about a deeply dysfunctional culture steeped in grievance and hatred. Most of the citizens of this Arab world believe quite sincerely and wholeheartedly that "the Jews" were behind 9/11. The latest piece of wisdom is that Israel, America, and India—the Jews, the Crusaders, and the Hindus—were behind the tsunami. Even medieval Europe didn't blame Jews for earthquakes. For this and many other reasons, this is not an ambience ripe for democracy. Israel's best bet for surviving in this ambience, for now, is to maintain military control, or at least military access, from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, not to indulge wishes and games of the "democratization" of a society steeped in primitive myth and hatred. It would be best for our leaders to give President Bush that realistic message.
Dermer: I think Mr. Hornik is mistaken in suggesting that the "democracy idea" and the war on terror are two separate policy goals. They are not. The root cause of terrorism - defined as the deliberate and systematic attack on civilians to achieve a political goal - is not poverty or despair brought on by a sense of grievance, as is commonly believed. If poverty were the root cause of terrorism, Haiti would be a center of international terrorism. And if political, national, social, economic or other grievances were the root causes of terrorism, then Ghandi and Martin Luther King would have been terrorists. But they were not. The root cause of terrorism, rather, is a totalitarian mindset that is almost always bred under conditions of tyranny. That is why every totalitarian regime has employed terrorism both against its own people and against its neighbors. In free societies, terrorism is exceedingly rare, and is never seen on a mass scale.
Since the root cause of terrorism is a mindset bred in tyranny, it follows that the antidote to terrorism is the building of free societies. Mr. Hornik is quite right that Middle Eastern societies need to be de-Nazified. But what he seems not to recognize is that German society was de-Nazified by democratization. The difference between Germany in 1933 and 1943 was not that German culture had changed. It was that a totalitarian regime had brainwashed and/or terrorized tens of millions of people. Likewise, the difference between Germany in 1943 and 1953 was that this brainwashing and terror was replaced by German democracy. At the end of the day, what protects the free world today from the reemergence of German and Japanese militarism is not the force of arms but rather the thriving democracies in those societies.
Returning to the question of Mr. Qutb, Mr. Hornik seems to believe that the evidence of the encounter of this alienated intellectual (and the handful of 9/11 terrorists) with the West is somehow proof that large parts of the Arab world harbor feelings of fear and loathing toward the West. But how does he know this? Would Mr. Hornik base his views on what Americans believe based on the writings of Noam Chomsky or other alienated academics or on radical left-wing forces that believe that America is the root of all evil in the world. I think here Mr. Hornik is simply using the exception to make the rule. But let's assume that Hornik is right for a moment for the sake of argument. Widespread Arab concerns over the dangers posed by a radically liberal West would not in any way undermine Sharansky's argument for the compatibility of free societies with any people/culture. Sharansky does not say what form free societies in the Arab/Muslim world will take. Those free societies will surely reflect the unique culture and heritage of Arabs and Muslims - just as Japanese democracy reflects Japanese culture and traditions. Also, it is important for me to make clear that Natan Sharansky does not say that all people will choose a free society over a fear society. He says that the majority of all people will choose freedom for the simple reason that they don't want to live in fear.
Having grown up in a free society, I know how easy it can be to misinterpret the signals that are coming from a regime based on fear. But when someone's entire life and livelihood is controlled by a regime, when one can be arrested or killed for even a minor act of dissent, the true feeling of "the people" cannot be easily measured. Here, I defer to Natan Sharansky who was raised in fear society and understands the mechanics of tyranny that sustain them. In his view, these societies are filled with doublethinkers who become habituated to parroting the ideology of the regime. But once a fear society collapses, the sense of freedom that these doublethinkers feel is tremendously powerful and they will never want to return to a life of slavery (see Ukraine).
I also believe that the view of the situation in Iraq is fundamentally mistaken, at least in terms of what it tells us about the prospects for Arab democracy. We must put what is happening in Iraq in perspective. America occupied Japan for 7 1\2 years. This occupation came after total victory on the battlefield. Moreover, Japan was not surrounded by countries who were dispatching hordes of terrorists to undermine Japanese democracy. What should amaze people is not how little has been achieved in Iraq, but precisely the opposite, particularly with the forces of terror convinced that Iraq is the major front in their war against the free world.
Finally, it is important to remember that one of Sharansky's key points is that the free world must do its part to encourage democracy by standing on the side of freedom. For many decades, in the name of stability, dictators and strongmen were courted throughout the region. Until now, some people in the Middle East hated the West not because of its ideals but rather because they saw it as betraying them. If the free world stands by its principles, it will find that its greatest allies are those peoples who suffer under repressive regimes.
Communism and Fascism had absolutely no connection to the Islamic world but that did not stop regimes in the region from importing these "western" ideas. It’s high time that the Arab world import a "western" idea that will serve its people rather than subjugate them.
Hitchens: Well, I admit that I am writing these words having stayed up most of the night with celebrating and happy Iraqis, whose reaction to the maturity and courage demonstrated by their fellow-countrymen was one I shall not soon forget. I wasn't euphoric before and I am not euphoric now, but the conduct of the Iraqi and Kurdish people on 30 January surely deserves a page of its own in any record of the struggle for democracy and dignity. And I need scarcely add that this is a predominantly Arab electorate, not a Turkish or Kurdish one.
It may be said that only the presence of Coalition forces, with a brilliantly-executed plan for security, enabled this moment. However, many citizens who woke up that day must have made at least the assumption that their protection from fascist terror was by no means guaranteed. And they went out to vote anyway. And the words which they employed to describe their motives and desires were precisely the words one might have dared to hope they would utter: a combination of personal responsibility with an ambition to live in an open society. The frequent rejection of segregationist language, or of glib definition as Sunni or Shi'a, was especially encouraging. I do not believe that any supposed culture or religion can repress such self-evident aspirations, or distort their commonsensical articulation. The votes of the exiles and expatriates are especially noteworthy in this respect: we often forget that millions of the most talented and qualified people in the Arab and Muslim world have been compelled to live outside their own societies, and there is much to be hoped for in the future from this diaspora.
Let me mention an Israeli dissident of my own acquaintance: the late Dr Israel Shahak of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose chairmanship of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights was so exemplary. On occasion, when I would call him or call upon him, and ask how things were going forward, he would reply in his unforgettable tones: "Zere are encouraging signs of polarisation." By this, he meant not that antagonism was a good thing in itself (he was a survivor of Bergen-Belsen) but that progress is only achieved by dialectical and confrontational means.
In recent statements, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has done us the favor of stating bluntly that he is against all elections, not just the recent Iraqi one, and that democracy is a vile infidel and Greek import to the pure world of Islamic theocracy. As it happens, he also regards the Shi'a faith as a noxious heresy, and is himself not even an Iraqi. So who is the "import" here? Meanwhile, Grand Ayatollah Sistani (who is actually not an Iraqi either, but an Iranian) has said that voting is a religious duty and that it is essential that wives, mothers and daughters also take part in the process. I certainly do not believe that voting is any kind of religious duty, but this is the kind of "polarisation" that is extremely helpful in clarifying matters.
The main enemy is Salafi jihadism. These forces did not even lose the elections in Afghanistan: they declined to contest them and sought to sabotage them. Ditto for Iraq. This must tell us something. Meanwhile, a leader of Hamas in Gaza has just told David Remnick of the New Yorker that he was slightly apprehensive about taking part in elections because Hamas might win, and in that case would either have to declare total war on Israel or start making a deal with it. (Neither contingency seemed all that attractive to him.) Thus, I think it is possible to say that the logic of democracy, and its essential corollary of responsibility, is already at work in the Middle East. We should take a moment to acknowledge this, as we salute the extraordinary sacrifice of those who have died, and are dying, to bring it about.
Hornik: Mr. Hitchens says he is not euphoric about the Iraqi elections, but he does sound elated. I confess that I am not even elated. There's too much we still don't know and too much that can still go wrong. Will the emerging Shi'ite-dominated regime grant real minority rights to the Sunnis? Will the Sunnis accept its rule in any case? Will the civil war continue? Will the relatively moderate views of Sistani prevail, or will the regime be more strictly Islamic? What role will Iran play? With whom will this regime align? Will the Kurds be granted a degree of autonomy that is acceptable to them? Will women be emancipated? How long will the U.S. and Britain stay or be allowed to stay, and will they continue to be bogged down in a conflict on Iraqi soil that drains crucial resources from the war on terror? Will the domestic and foreign insurgents be defeated, and if so, how long will it take? Will the regime, like every other Arab regime, eventually use anti-American, anti-Israeli, and anti-Semitic passions to mobilize the masses, or will it be the sole exception? Will other Arab autocrats react to this situation by loosening their grip on their societies and allowing substantial and genuine reforms, or by tightening that grip to make sure they keep their power? At this moment, torture is still rampant in Iraqi jails; Christians are fleeing the country; relatively secular women are wearing Islamic garb for fear of persecution by Islamists. Will all these problems be solved to the extent that Iraq will emerge as a bona fide democracy?
In the long run, will the U.S. attempt to bring democracy to Iraq turn out to be a difficult, protracted, costly, but necessary and ultimately successful chapter in the war on terror, or will it turn out to be a self-defeating diversion that tied down a large portion of the armed forces, weakened the war's popularity on the home front, and made it harder, not easier, to deal with kingpins of terror like Iran and North Korea that pose a worse threat than Saddam posed? Saddam, I believe, was worth overthrowing both morally and prudentially, but as for what one does in the aftermath, I admit that I have no easy answers, and that the decision not to finish him off in the first Gulf War now emerges as more understandable. But it may eventually emerge that it would have been wiser to replace him right away with a relatively mild, pro-Western autocrat than to try this democratic experiment that has cost so much blood, made Iraq a magnet for forces of international jihad, and not resolved the dangerous divisions in its body politic.
What will eventually answer all of these questions is time. For now, I am not euphoric or elated, but skeptical and worried.
Mr. Dermer is sure that all societies want essentially the same things, and that Islam is just a variant on this universal, Western-freedom-seeking human nature. As for the German case, Germany had already achieved democracy before its descent into Nazism and is part of the Western democratic civilization. As for the Japanese case, Japan belongs to a part of the world, East Asia, that has shown a talent for democracy as also in the cases of Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong. The Islamic world, and particularly the Arab world, has still shown no such "talent." The most successful cases are still Turkey, where to a considerable extent Islam has been suppressed, and Indonesia, where most of the population is still loosely Islamic and, in any case, problems abound. Democracy has also achieved some partial but fragile success in mostly-Muslim Senegal, Mali, and Bangladesh. I believe it is presumptuous to think that this low success level, out of some 47 Islamic countries in the world, is more or less accidental and all these societies are ultimately destined to opt for, and successfully practice, democracy as Germany and Japan do. It is already clear and not speculative that Islam's attitudes toward non-Muslims, toward women, toward secular authority, and its penchant for harsh sectarian divisions within the Islamic world, pose serious problems for democratization—and especially in those Muslim societies, which includes the Arab world, where the number of Islamic believers and the strength of the Islamic ethos are greatest.
Let me note that the perils of applying democratic practices to the Arab world were recently illustrated again with the landslide victory of Hamas—the most retrograde sort of organization one can imagine—in municipal elections in the West Bank and Gaza.
I think I can sum up by saying that I'm more Huntingtonian than my Sharanskyan or Fukuyaman interlocutors, and a lot less optimistic. However, I thank them for their interesting and stimulating thoughts.
Dermer: I would like to ask the "skeptics" to consider whether over 60% of the people in any Western society would have voted in an election if they knew they would be targeted by terrorists. Many in the free world often underestimate the power of freedom because they have never lived in fear. The vote in Iraq is a powerful reminder that no people want to live in fear. Undoubtedly, the celebrations in Iraq sent a chill down the spines of the tyrants in Riyadh, Tehran, and Damascus. By not abandoning its principles, by standing on the side of freedom, and by linking its policies toward how non-democratic regimes treat their own people, the democratic world has an historic opportunity to help freedom spread throughout the Arab world. We squander that opportunity at our peril.
FP: Last word goes to you Mr. Hitchens.
Hitchens: Mr. Hornik could be right in all his reservations and misgivings, and yet be wrong. I became involved with Iraqi and Kurdish friends who were pushing for regime-change before George Bush had become governor of Texas, and over the years I have learned much from them about democratic and secular values (as well as about courage and grace).Now it seems that there were many more such people, buried under the rubble of Ba'athism and jihadism, than any of us may have dared hope. Victory cannot be guaranteed in advance, as some seem to demand. Failure and defeat, though, are assured if we remain passive or neutral. However forbidding the apparent odds, then, it is plainly our duty to identify with such forces and to show them our solidarity, as they have done in fighting several of our battles for us.
FP: Gentlemen, thank you. More than anything, I think we have to keep in mind what an incredible success the Reagan Doctrine was in the Cold War. The support of dissidents and freedom fighters throughout the communist world played a significant role in shattering the totalitarian entity we knew as communism. Islamism is communism’s -- and fascism’s -- cousin. Mr. Sharansky might have very well just provided the world a priceless gift in reminding us that, like communism, Islamism can be penetrated and destroyed with the most powerful yearning in the heart of man: to be free.
Christopher Hitchens, Ron Dermer and David Hornik, it was an honor to be in your presence and we are very grateful for your time and energy to have discussed this crucial topic with us today. We hope to see you all again soon. |
