Then there’s Egypt, a nice enough place as long as you’re not a Coptic Christian. Over the past half-century Egypt has been ruled by just three presidents. Nasser and Sadat were members of the Free Officers Movement revolt of 1952. Mubarak was Sadat’s vice president from the National Democratic Party that Sadat established in 1977. In the Egyptian version of ‘democracy,’ the president is nominated by the NDP-dominated People’s Assembly, and then ratified (unchallenged) by popular referendum.
Under that system, Mubarak was re-elected in 1999 by the same 95 percent of the vote he ‘won’ in three previous elections. Surprised?
Elections may not be all that free in Egypt, but there is plenty of media freedom. That is, media freedom for anti-Semitism and Israel-bashing, all in violation of the 1979 peace treaty with Israel. But what can you do? Democracy is democracy.
At least Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and several North African states don’t even try to pretend. They are honest in their opposition to western-style government, usually taking the position that democracy, pluralism, and tolerance is alien to their Arabic cultures and Islamic inclinations.
With the Iraqi war over, the United States has been promising a democratization process in Iraq. The Bush administration wants to promote democracy throughout the Middle East. In December 2002, Washington earmarked $145 million for a project called the Middle East Partnership Initiative, and President Bush has called for democratic reforms in the Palestinian Authority before the Palestinians win statehood.
Acting on cue shortly before the American invasion of Iraq, Syria publicized a withdrawal — some would call it a cosmetic redeployment — of troops in Lebanon. Even Saudi Arabia hinted that reform was on the way. Whether or not any of this pans out remains to be seen, but a reasonable question to ask is whether the U.S. should try to forcibly export democracy to the Middle East rather than waiting for the Arab regimes to institute it on their own.
There are plenty of minorities in the Arab world, North Africa and the Middle East who await real democracy. There are Lebanese who suffer daily occupation under a vicious Syrian regime. There are Kurds throughout the Middle East and Assyrians in Iraq who aspire to independence. There are Berbers — the pre-Arab indigenous population — in North Africa who, after 11 centuries, are still resisting Arabization. There are Christians in Egypt who are attacked by Islamic radicals and persecuted. There are Christians and Animists in the Sudan who resist slavery or Islamicization.
And so on and so on — all are non-Arab or non-Muslim minorities who long for the United States to bring regime change to their areas too. (See Minorities in the Middle East: A History of Struggle and Self-Expression, by Mordechai Nisan, and The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam by Bat Ye’or, to get a better sense of the problem).
Which brings us to the most serious measure of just how committed to democratic reform anyone is — the Israeli-Palestinian issue. The ‘Quartet’ — the U.S., the EU, the UN and Russia — pushed hard for its ‘road map’ to peace, with the promise of Palestinian statehood by 2005. Earlier this year the Quartet’s Task Force on Palestinian Reform met in London, but only the U.S. demanded any real democratic reforms in the Palestinian Authority — and half-heartedly at that. The Europeans seemed to be more interested in financial accountability for their aid money than in democratic political reform.
They did, however, call for the appointment of a prime minister to limit Arafat’s power. Hand-picked by Yasir Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas — Abu Mazen — is a founding member of Arafat’s Fatah and has been Arafat’s second-in-command for as long as anyone can remember.
