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partment, it is hard to find fault with this. When the domino-advocates speak of democracy, they mean -- but do not clarify that they mean -- liberal democracy, a set of values and attitudes including tolerance of diverse religions and ideas and a commitment to peaceful settlement of disputes. But as Daniel Brumberg points out in The Journal of Democracy (October 2002), liberal Islam "constitutes a limited intellectual trend that has thus far not sunk organizational roots in Arab societies." Islamist thought, as Max Rodenbeck has noted, has not gone beyond denunciations of heresy and repetitions of formulas from the Koran. Just this year at Mecca, millions of Muslim pilgrims concluded the annual Haj with repeated chants of "Murder the Jews" and "Death to America."As for electoral democracy, a fundamentalist Kuwaiti parliamentarian predicts: "Whenever there is true democracy, the Islamists will prevail." We must recognize that If there is one genuinely popular passion in the Arab world it is hatred for Israel: electoral democracy could easily result in a nightmare tidal wave of Islamists and secularists focusing their energies on destroying the Jewish state.
If the notion of democratic dominoes is flawed, the State Department's belief that creating a Palestinian state will produce peace and stability is downright ludicrous.
Brumberg notes that the Middle East has actually been on the path of what he calls "deliberalization." The generals who had ruled Algeria for 30 years in the name of an alleged "socialist" vision provided a political opening in 1989: the Islamists won, were deprived of their victory, and 100,000 people have died in the subsequent civil war. In Tunisia, in 1999, President Ben Ali won another term with a Saddam-sized 99.4% of the vote. Bashar Assad opened up Syria a crack when he succeeded his father and swiftly shut the door, quickly convinced by his associates that freedom was a slippery slope. Even Jordan has recently passed laws further restricting freedom of the press. All this is not to say that the Middle East is forever impervious to liberalization: it is to say that it cannot be imposed by the West, and if it happens at all, is likely to be a slow internal process requiring enormous cultural changes, including difficult-to-achieve profound changes in Islamic thought.
But if the notion of democratic dominoes is flawed, the State Department's belief that creating a Palestinian state will produce peace and stability is downright ludicrous. The Arab world as it is today does not accept the existence of a Jewish state in any borders; the problem is not "settlements" beyond the armistice lines of 1949 -- for the Arabs, "the Zionist entity" is an intolerable "settlement" in its entirety. Hence the insistence on the "return of refugees" to transform Israel into Arab Palestine overnight.
Moreover, as columnist Carl Alpert points out, even if the U.S. forces a Palestinian state into existence, it will not be viable. No matter how the boundaries are set, it will be divided, partly in Gaza, partly in Judea and Samaria, separated by Israel. It will have no economic base. When a local family opened a meat processing plant recently, employing 88 people, it made headlines. There is little industry or agriculture and no natural resources. Income from employment in Israel used to be 40% of the population's earnings; in the wake of suicide bombings, little of that remains. It is massive support from European countries and the U.S. that has kept the Palestinian Authority afloat: the rest of the Arab world largely reneged on its pledges of funds. As Alpert notes, "the several million inhabitants, including perhaps an equal number of Arab refugees who the other Arab states will quickly dump into the new 'homeland,' will be constantly on the verge of starvation. They will become a perpetual international burden....Conditions in such a state will lead to perpetual instability, hostility and continued terrorism and wars."
Yet the State Department, the President in tow, thinks this "anti-nation," which defines its entire meaning and purpose from the desire to destroy another nation, which has developed through, lives in, and depends on opposition to Zionism and Israel, will bring peace and stability to the Middle East. How apparently intelligent people can for a moment entertain such an idea is, as the King of Siam says in the famous musical, "a puzzlement." The timeline makes the whole idea even more absurd. The PA, an inferno of terror and hatred of both the U.S. and Israel, is to be transformed into a liberal, peaceful polity within a matter of months!
The State Department, the Defense Department and the President all need to rethink radically their basic assumptions. They would do well to begin by reading Lee Harris's "Our World Historical Gamble" (available at www.techcentralstation.com). Harris describes the way Western liberal policies have nourished fantasies in the Middle East. The greatest danger, says Harris, arises from the coalescing of the delusional dreams characteristic of the region "into the fantasy ideology of radical Islam, the essence of which is that the West must be destroyed. For what this fantasy ideology seeks to accomplish is the abrogation of liberal modernity, and its greatest symbol, the United States of America." Harris writes that there is a criterion for measuring the success of any action on our part and that is, "Does our action tend to make the Islamic fantasists more or less realistic in their assessment of the world? Success comes when we have created a higher degree of pragmatic realism on their part; failure comes when we have simply encouraged them in their fantasies."
Harris is emphatic that we not be misled into trying to win the hearts and minds of Islamic fantasists. Our aim is simple, writes Harris: it is to make the fantasists respect reality. And "if we are to teach others a sense of
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Outpost - 4 - April 2003