George W Bush may not have read much history but he likes making it. The recent run of insider accounts of the Bush White House, show the president is a man with a constant eye on the historians of the future, anxious to lend every moment just enough semi-Churchillian gravitas to make him look good in the decades to come.
So it was on Monday, when he was handed a note that declared ”Iraq is sovereign”, that he immediately scrawled on it ”Let freedom reign!” — as if ready for instant display behind the glass case in the future George W Bush presidential library. Those three words confirm how Bush sees himself and how he wants to be seen in the future — as a latter-day George Washington, leading subject peoples to liberty.
He has in mind not only the Iraqi nation but all the people of what he calls the Greater Middle East. The ”liberation of Baghdad” is but the first step towards the transformation of the entire region.
It is not a secret plan, contained only in classified memoranda. On the contrary, Bush has declared it loud and proud, returning to the theme again in Istanbul on Tuesday. He articulated it most clearly in a November 2003 speech to the United States’s National Endowment for Democracy where he set out how, though there were now 120 functioning democracies in the world, the wave of self-rule had barely touched the Middle East. Democracy had made inroads in Latin America and Asia, but had still failed to make a dent in the Arab world. Why not, the president asked: ”Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism?”
Bush went on to reject such ”cultural condescension”, insisting that liberty is universal. He called on the Arab states to open up — to respect the rule of law, recognise the equal rights of women and allow political pluralism and free speech.
For my money, it was the best speech Bush has ever given. Because on this fundamental point he is surely right. One has only to flick through the 2002 joint report of the United Nations development programme and the Arab fund for economic and social development to see why.
This document, written by a group of Arab intellectuals, bursts with findings as stunning as they are bleak. All 22 Arab states combined, oozing as they are with natural resources and the black gold that is oil, still have a gross domestic product smaller than Spain’s and less than half that of California. Education is in a dire state: the whole Arab world translates about 300 books annually, one fifth the number translated by Greece alone. Rates of Internet connection, the Arab scholars found, were less than those in sub-Saharan Africa.
What’s more, the Palestinians of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza are not the only Arabs to be denied fundamental democratic rights. Using the widely accepted freedom index — which assesses everything from civil liberties to government accountability and a free press — the Arab states come at the foot of the global league table. The report was especially damning on the exclusion of women, often denied the vote and access to a basic education: ”Sadly, the Arab world is largely depriving itself of the productivity and creativity of half its citizens.”
Bush was right to draw attention to this story of oppression and failure.
Nor can he be faulted for placing it in the context of his war against al-Qaeda. For, if ”Bin Ladenism” feeds off anything, it is surely the frustration and despair of those who have to live in such suffocating conditions. If the right approach to the current global conflict is the one advocated by the likes of Bill Clinton — tough on terror, tough on the causes of terror — then surely the foremost ”cause” is the desperate state of the Arab world.
So Bush is right in identifying the problem. Where he is wrong is in understanding its causes — and in finding a solution.
To his credit, the president does not imagine some innate Muslim or Arab incapacity for self-government: he attributes such attitudes to his enemies. But he speaks as if the Arab world became a desert for democracy through some strange act of nature, a freak accident with no rational explanation besides the evil rule of a couple of twisted dictators. What he — nor British Prime Minister Tony Blair for that matter — never acknowledges is the West’s own culpability.
One does not have to be a placard-waving anti-imperialist to note that for nearly a century the Arab world has been on the receiving end of constant Western meddling. If they have not got on with choosing their own governments, that is partly because the West kept (and keeps) stopping them. Iraq is a case in point as Britain repeatedly, from the 1920s to the 1950s, ensured the regime was to our liking. That pattern has been repeated across the region, from the tiny emirates created by a stroke of a Western pen, to mighty Egypt: first Britain and then the US have always plotted and connived to secure a friendly face at the top, even if the price has been the denial of the people’s will.
So Bush’s rhetoric is all very well, but it would ring truer if it entailed an explicit renunciation of that colonial habit. And this is not ancient history. The US still props up hideous, human rights-abusing regimes so long as the top man remains ”our son of a bitch”. Look no further than Bush’s closest chum, the ruling family of Saudi Arabia. When Bush severs his links with the House of Saud over their beheadings, oppression of women, rank corruption and denial of basic human freedom, then his words will have meaning.
But the president is wrong on the solution, too. Democracy only very rarely flows down the barrel of a gun. Post-1945 Germany and Japan were surely the exceptions in exceptional circumstances. Even putting the 2003 war to one side, the images of abuse in Abu Ghraib alone would disqualify the US as a credible bringer of democracy to the Middle East.
Instead, that task will have to be performed by other people and in a different way. That does not mean a new mandate to meddle, but rather a more creative use of influence. The first move will be a withdrawal of support from offending regimes, Riyadh and Cairo among them. Next, aid and trade should be tied to democratic performance. (A cheaper and less lethal way to create a democratic model in the Middle East than invading Iraq was surely to make Egypt’s annual $2-billion aid package from the US conditional on Cairo sharpening up its act in the liberty department. That would have done the trick, without a shot being fired.) The West could put current Arab and other tyrannies on notice that their only way back into the global community is not simply to arrest al-Qaeda suspects but to grant basic freedoms to their own people.
Do that and Bush will then have every right to his Washingtonian rhetoric. He can chant ”Let freedom reign” at the top of his voice. But not till then. — Â