A BET ON TRUTH
By Jackson Oiehl (Washington Post, May 19, 2003)

Survey Egypt's secular, "pro-Western" intelligentsia about the Bush administration's hopes of democratizing the Middle East and you'll get an outpouring of bile. No such transformation is likely, they'll say, and if it happens it will only bring Islamic extremists to power. There's no point in pursuing the issue, they add, until after the IsraeliPalestinian conflict is solved. Anyway, the United States isn't really interested in a democratic Middle East n only in "colonizing" Iraq, monopolizing its oil and making the region safe for Israel.

Cairo-based diplomats and correspondents have faithfully relayed those diatribes to Washington in recent months, usually with the conclusion that the American initiative is rejected even by the writers and professors who support friendly US.-Egyptian relations. Sometimes, maybe in a footnote or the final paragraph of a news article, they'll throw in a reference to Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the sociologist and democracy advocate who has just lived through 21/2 years of persecution and imprisonment for having a different vision. Just as often, he's left out.

Here's what Ibrahim says: The state-sponsored Arab establishment is wrong. Democracy has spread through almost every region of the world, and it can take hold in the Middle East as well. Surveys show that average Arabs hunger for greater freedom and reform of the failed regimes that rule them. Islamic movements are a minority and won't win elections; if they do, they can be obliged to follow democratic rules. If the United States presses a democratic agenda consistently and shows staying power, it canhelp home grown democratic movements transform the region.

"There are obstacles, but they can be overcome if you believe in change, in the possibility of change and the necessity for change, and you work for it," Ibrahim said during a visit to Washington last week. "You persist, and if the world takes note, you ultimately triumph. It happened in the Soviet Union. It happened in Eastern Europe. It can happen anywhere."

Ibrahim, a M-year-old professor with a shaggy gray beard and a cane, is not calling for the United States to impose democracy by force, and he's not saying the IsraeliPalestinian conflict is not important. He is saying that invoking Palestine and political Islam have been the last resorts of Arab dictators and their apologists for decades. And he's insisting that if the United States only makes an effort, it will find it has allies. "If you just give people a chance, if you go to the Arab masses and ask people to express themselves, you'll be very surprised how many people are committed to democracy, and committed to peace," he says.

He has a practical plan: "Let us craft a charter or a road map for every country," he told a roomful of people at the National Endowment for Democracy last Thursday. "Make it conditional-- Middle Eastern countries are eager for aid and trade. Here is an opportunity to say, 'Let us have a timetable for democratic reform.' " In Egypt, he knows just what Washington should ask for: a lifting of the 22-year-old state of emergency -which makes independent political activity impossible -- full freedom of the press and constitutional reforms that will allow for free elections. Egyptians will take care of the rest. "If there is a margin of freedom in which you can fight, we are determined to take that margin and expand it," he said.

Ibrahim has friends in Washington the Bush administration froze a supplemental aid package for Egypt until he was released from prison earlier this year. (He was originally arrested in June 2000, shortly after he published a sarcastic critique of the possibility that Egypt's autocratic president, Hosni Mubarak, would seek to install his son Gamal as his successor.) But many people, in Washington as well as in Egypt, dismiss lbrahim as irrelevant. "He knows how to play to a Western audience," a former State Department policymaker recently told me. "But he doesn't represent anyone in Egypt."

Maybe such assessments are accurate. But what's striking about them is how they echo, almost exactly, what I used to hear about Soviet Bloc thinkers such as Andrei Sakharov, Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik, who also preached that the combination of independent civic movements and international pressure could transform their region. The establishment intelligentsia in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union -- the "liberals" who frequented Western diplomatic receptions -- disdained the dissidents. What the United States should aim at, they insisted, was not democracy but "peace" between East and West; the idea that the Communist system could be overcome simply was unrealistic.

Even in the 1980s that logic made sense to many in the West; it was only later that it became clear that, even if they appeared isolated, Havel and Sakharov were destined to triumph, because the truth was on their side. The old regimes were rotten, collapse was inevitable, and people did yearn for democracy and human rights.

There was a lesson in all that -- yet now, 15 years later, the naysaying of the Arab world's entrenched official elite is retailed as reality in Washington, while Saad Eddin Ibrahim and other independent democracy advocates too often are ignored or dismissed. Turbulent times are probably ahead in theMiddle East. But I'd bet that once again, the democratic dissident fresh from prison is on the right side of history.