August 06 Newsletter

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A Reply to Steven Cook
Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, with Blake Hounshell

The following is a response to Stephen Cook’s “U.S. Policy: Hypocrisy, Principles, and Reform in the Middle East” that appeared in the July Carnegie Arab Reform Bulletin. In an op-ed piece published in the New York Times in May of 2005, I wrote that Islamist political parties were ready to participate in free and fair elections, but should be required to adhere to certain “rules of the game” in order to do so.

 I called upon the Bush administration to outline a “clear doctrine” according to which it would accept the results. When U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave a major speech at the American University of Cairo later that summer, her conditions were more basic than those I enumerated.

In a veiled reference to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, she said that “those who would participate in elections, both supporters and opponents of the government, also have responsibilities. They must accept the rule of law, reject violence, respect the standards of free elections, and peacefully accept the results.” Steven Cook revisits this idea by taking issue with unnamed Arab columnists who charged the Bush administration with hypocrisy for its attempts to ignore, isolate and squeeze Hamas in the wake of its recent electoral success. It is clear from the way the Bush administration has now pulled back from pressing a democracy agenda in the Middle East that, had it expected such a strong showing from Hamas, it would have behaved differently. Cook argues that the problem is not that the Bush administration is unwilling to work with these actors, but rather that it “has not forcefully upheld key democratic principles such as non-violence and the rule of law.” Cook elaborates slightly on his principles, echoing those that I had specified earlier; in order to be considered democratic, political organiza-tions must adhere to “rule of law, rights of women and minorities, religious and political tolerance, transparency, and alternation of power.

” Hamas in particular, according to Cook, does not meet these conditions. Cook does not mention that neither do Washington’s allies. Though Cook does not say so explicitly, the implication is that it would have been better had the United States leaned on its clients (Abbas, Mubarak, and the Hariri bloc) to deny the Islamists from participating in the elections on these grounds. I had also written that “countries opening themselves to democracy … should not allow those groups unwilling to abide by certain rules into the game.” But despite not committing explicitly to any specific conditions, these groups were more or less allowed to participate, and they did extraordinarily well. The Middle East confounds easy typologies.

 To be sure, Hamas’ rhetoric and actions have been violent, especially those of the so-called “Damascus wing” led by Khalid Meshaal. But does Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement have clean hands? The ceasefire brokered by Egypt’s Omar Suleiman, though now defunct, was actually more closely adhered to by Hamas than by Fatah’s radical Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades faction. And President Abbas put Palestinian politics in turmoil when, in a maneuver of dubious legality following Hamas’ surprise victory, he immediately aggregated greater powers to the presidency. While internal infighting seems to have died down in the face of a renewed Israeli crackdown, elements of Fatah and Hamas have engaged in fierce street battles.

 The Mubarak regime, for its part, routinely uses violence against its own citizens. During the Egyptian elections, it was the security services and their hired thugs who violently prevented opponents of the National Democratic Party from voting. As for the Lebanese, in addition to the dynamics of power, a tacit agreement between sects leery of a new civil war has allowed Hizballah to keep its weapons in exchange for the Shi’a remaining underrepresented in the national government. In theory, successful statehood requires a monopoly of force within a country’s borders, a condition that does not obtain in Iraq.

 The United States has committed itself to working with Islamist movements and parties in Iraq, which it has heralded as a great success for democracy in a region with little history of it. The Iraqi political scene is dominated by sectarian parties with open or shadowy ties to well-armed militias, such as the Mahdi Army of the Sadr Movement and the Badr Brigades, an Iranian-backed militia affiliated with the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). It is impossible to imagine America calling for disarming of the peshmerga, its Kurdish allies’ historic defense of last resort. After more than three years of the U.S. occupation, the presence and power of armed militias is greater then ever. So if it is charges of hypocrisy that Cook would avoid, he would have to explain how America can partner with the very entities in Iraq that share many of the same characteristics as Hamas, the Brotherhood, and Hizballah. These groups are close to their publics, they are growing ever more popular, and in many cases they are more effective than the corrupt, autocratic governments they seek to replace. Their success as movements, in no small measure due to Washington’s own policies in the region such as unqualified support for Israel, has propelled them from the margins to the mainstream. As I have argued recently in the Washington Post, the Bush administration’s attempts to fight this reality have been grossly counterproductive.

 Even more troubling is that within those movements, hardline elements have gained the upper hand over more pragmatic or moderate actors. In my visit to the West Bank this past spring, I was told by Hamas leaders that they were planning on making the transition to becoming merely a political party and recognizing Israel, but that they desperately needed more time and breathing space in order to bring the rank and file around.

 But the U.S. and Israeli impatience on one side, and Syrian and Iran intransigence on the other, made this impossible. Cook is certainly right about one thing: the United States is not obligated to support Islamist political currents and parties. Now that it has made democracy promotion the centerpiece of its foreign policy, however, the Bush administration cannot change the rules in the middle of the game, nor can it pick winners. As Mahdi Akef of the Muslim Brotherhood often says, these groups’ legitimacy comes “from the street” and not from Washington.

 Washington should abandon its hopes of isolating or delegitimizing Islamists. Instead, it should recognize that they are here to stay and try to work with the emerging Islamist reality. Finally, Washington should not hold opposition parties—who may or may

not turn out to be democratic- -to a higher standard than they hold what the weight of evidence suggests certainly are an anti-democratic group: Arab regimes themselves.