When it comes to spreading democracy Natan Sharansky has famously called President Bush a “dissident.”
There are two distinct marks of a dissident. First, dissidents are fired by ideas and stay true to them no matter the consequences. Second, they generally believe that betraying those ideas would constitute the greatest of moral failures. Give up, they say to themselves, and evil will triumph. Stand firm, and they can give hope to others and help change the world.Political leaders make the rarest of dissidents. In a democracy, a leader’s lifeline is the electorate’s pulse. Failure to be in tune with public sentiment can cripple any administration and undermine any political agenda. Moreover, democratic leaders, for whom compromise is critical to effective governance, hardly ever see any issue in Manichaean terms. In their world, nearly everything is colored in shades of gray.
That is why President George W. Bush is such an exception. He is a man fired by a deep belief in the universal appeal of freedom, its transformative power, and its critical connection to international peace and stability. Even the fiercest critics of these ideas would surely admit that Mr. Bush has championed them both before and after his re-election, both when he was riding high in the polls and now that his popularity has plummeted, when criticism has come from longstanding opponents and from erstwhile supporters.
But nowadays his ideas are out of fashion
The fortunes of Mr. Sharansky and his ideas about freedom rose and sunk with President Bush’s opinion polls. His “The Case for Democracy” came along, three years ago, when the administration seriously looked to push it in the Muslim world. The president loved the book, and Mr. Sharansky became the in-house philosopher for the Bush Doctrine. “If you want a glimpse of how I think about foreign policy, read Natan Sharansky’s book,” blurbs Mr. Bush on the back cover of the paperback edition.But democracy is a dirty word these days. So Mr. Sharansky is lonely too, bounced out of Israeli politics and out of favor. He, Vaclav Havel and other former Eastern European dissident faces of the freedom agenda are dismissed as Cold War naïfs, pernicious Utopians, or worse–men whose moral Manichaeism has no business in the “complex Middle East.”
America is back to its realist ways in the region, propping up Egyptian and Saudi gerontocrats. The day I visit Mr. Sharansky, Condi Rice is here to prod all sides to another Middle East peace conference, with no mention of political opening as part of the bargain.
Still Sharansky tries to be upbeat.
Mr. Sharansky says Washington didn’t give the freedom agenda a chance. When the administration briefly pressed Arab dictatorships, if only with tougher rhetoric, “there were results,” he says, citing Egypt’s release of dissident Saad Ibrahim and Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution against the Syrians.But the Saudis, Egyptians and others rightly figured the storm would pass. Hosni Mubarak bowed to pressure to hold presidential elections, then rigged them and for good measure imprisoned his opponent, Ayman Nour. “It’s such a clear return to the old days when from the top you have to try to decide with the leaders who don’t represent anything and ignore all your principles,” says Mr. Sharansky.
“I’m very careful not to be too critical of Bush simply because I believe that the very fact that we can disagree on a democratic agenda”–say over the wisdom of holding early elections–“is because there is such an agenda,” says Mr. Sharansky.
The funny thing is that idea of spreading democracy is often attributed to “neoconservatives” and with the failure of elections (so far) in the Middle East that failure has been attributed to the neoconservatives.
But as Daniel Pipes points out some of the neoconservatives to whom this failure is attributed, in fact, diverged from the Bush administration on several key areas such as
Democratization: When the president first announced the goal of increasing political participation in the Middle East, I applauded, even as I warned against the overly-abrupt replacement of tyranny with democracy, urging that the process be done slowly and cautiously. Noting that the actual implementation empowered Islamists, I assigned it a failing grade.
In fact those promoting elections as a shortcut to democracy tended not to be the neoconservatives but the realists and they failed to learn the lessons from Arafat’s election in 1996.
A real look at the question of Arafat’s legitimacy, therefore, has to involve a more serious examination of the origins of his rule in the wake of the 1993 Oslo accords–and particularly the crucial two-year period in which he established the Palestinian Authority and paved the way for himself and his loyalists to win a landslide victory at the polls. Such an accounting reveals a disturbing picture, of a PLO leadership that–after having been brought in from Tunis amid widespread jubilation–used every means at its disposal to ensure that the Palestinian voter would have only one viable option as to which political party would represent him, and only one real candidate to vote for as president. Under these conditions, Arafat’s landslide victory was not an expression of democratic will, but rather a testament to the success of the measures he employed.The story of how this came to pass is the subject of this essay. In it, I will document–in large part using original source material not previously published in the West–the rise of a regime characterized by a massive police force whose specialty was intimidation of political opponents; an executive branch in which Arafat alone made all major decisions and in which the civil service was reduced to a corrupt patronage machine; the institutionalized absence of the rule of law, and a judiciary that lacked any independence; and the intimidation of the media and human rights organizations, to the point that it became virtually impossible to transmit any message other than one personally approved by Arafat.
Others who have blogged about the Sharansky interview include Neo-neocon (at length), Daled Amos (briefly) and Yid with Lid.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
