[(Continued from p.8)]
or worse, misinformed -- and happy to have an unskilled job, a roof over their heads and some food on the table. They are not unsatisfied by a life that a CNN journalist, or a Columbia University assistant professor would find boring or degrading -- a regular job, a family that is not starving, and Baghdad TV for a couple of hours every night. The only change they want is more of the same -- a little more pay, a little more room, a little more food, a TV that works all the time. They already have a spiritual life -- non-secular -- that satisfies them. They are not interested in becoming multi-lateral or widening their spiritual horizons. The point is that most Iraqis live simple, unchanging lives and want them to continue that way. They are very much like people the world over. Most people do not want their lives to be transformed. They want to maintain the status quo. In fact people are probably hard-wired for it, the Constancy Principle, some call it. Please, no big changes. So much for the psychology of it.In the last thirteen hundred years, only one Islamic country has become a democracy -- Turkey. But in all that time there has never been an Arab democracy. And perhaps there never can be. Some would say that Arab ideals and representative democracy are incompatible, that in an Arab Islamic state authority and religious authority have always gone together. The majority of Arab states reached independence shortly after the Second World War. For thirty or forty years now the Arab states have been free to make whatever political or social arrangements they choose. Under the cover of some weird conglomeration of nationalism and socialism they all chose autocratic power.
The reason is that the influence of fundamentalist Islam in the Arab world makes it deeply inhospitable to democratic and liberal principles. While the citizens of longstanding democracies accept a set of basic assumptions -- the rule of law, majority rule, equality before the law, the idea of a loyal opposition, the separation of church and state -- Arab societies lack such essential democratic concepts and instead vest authority in the word of Mohammed, his interpreters the imams, and the tribal leaders.
The essence of Arab societies is tribal identity, kinship networks, and conceptions of collective honor. These are what organize and regulate the relations of everyday life. In such a context democratic principles are meaningless and incomprehensible. How could a modern democratic bureaucracy function, for example, if officials remain loyal primarily to tribe or family? There can be no such thing as disinterested public service. Public office becomes a means of benefiting your family and harming your enemies, not applying rules fairly.
Modern working democracies developed in different ways. And although they all share the political values mentioned above, their respective governments can be quite varied -- the United States, Switzerland, Singapore, the United Kingdom -- all democracies and all somewhat different.
One thing that they all share, though, is a basic requirement of all functioning democracies: a class of people who have a strong devotion to and understanding of its principles -- a professional bureaucracy. Iraq has no professional, public-spirited, bureaucratic class, nor has any other Arab nation. What substitutes for one in Iraq are the members of Saddam's extended family and his cronies from Tikrit. In Saudi Arabia, of course, it is the 7000 Saudi princes.
And experience with nearly a hundred newly independent countries all of which 'intended" to become democratic suggests that only a tiny handful, those largely influenced by Western values -- Chile, Poland, Hungary, Taiwan -- show any real gains in this direction. The rest, from the Congo to Uzbekistan, suffer from endemic corruption, illegitimate elections and a wide array of political ills that derive from the absence of a modern professional bureaucratic class that values the basic democratic ideas that come only from being trained and educated in Western democracies.
The influence of fundamentalist Islam in the Arab world makes it deeply inhospitable to democratic and liberal principles.
But what, you may say, about Japan?
One of the major arguments in the repertoire of those who propose democracy for Iraq is that we were able to transform a non-western and un-democratic Japan after the World War II in less than a generation.
What is overlooked by the proponents of democracy for Iraq is that Japan was a culturally homogeneous nation, unlike the contentious cultural jungle of Iraq, and that the Japanese people were, at least at that time, obeisant to the wishes of their Emperor, and that when he concurred with the Military Governor, Gen Douglas MacArthur, in the new political changes his subjects went along uncritically.
But most important, according to Stanley Kurtz, in the Winter 2003 issue of City Journal, "In embracing democracy under American occupation, the Japanese drew on a long, if imperfect, democratic tradition." Soon after Admiral Perry opened Japan to the outside world in 1853, Japan's leaders started on a series of democratic reforms which resulted in an authentic constitutional system by 1889. Kurtz points out that these democratic reforms were encouraged by "the liberty and popular rights movement, a remarkable efflorescence of the liberal spirit that deeply and enduringly changed Japanese society. As early as the 1870s, this intellectual movement had disseminated such Western thinkers as Mill and Rousseau to the farthest corners of Japan, where their influence inspired the Japanese to demand democracy."
Through these influences authentic national po-litical parties developed, and "Western political concepts
[(Continued on p.10)]
May 2004 - 9 - Outpost