Tag: democracy

Homecoming

Michael Yon has another wonderful dispatch from Iraq, following up on the story of how a group of local Iraqis are welcoming back Iraq’s Christian diaspora:

Today, Muslims mostly filled the front pews of St John’s. Muslims who want their Christian friends and neighbors to come home. The Christians who might see these photos likely will recognize their friends here. The Muslims in this neighborhood worry that other people will take the homes of their Christian neighbors, and that the Christians will never come back. And so they came to St John’s today in force, and they showed their faces, and they said, “Come back to Iraq. Come home.” They wanted the cameras to catch it. They wanted to spread the word: Come home. Muslims keep telling me to get it on the news. “Tell the Christians to come home to their country Iraq.”

I constantly hear many people here in America and elsewhere keep saying that Iraq simply can’t be democratic. The line usually goes about how you can’t change 4,000 years of culture. That argument never sits right with me: is Iraqi “culture” synonymous with terrorism and oppression? Are Iraqis somehow unable to accept others? It always seemed a bit like the arguments used to justify racism in the Deep South: since part of Southern “culture” had been corrosive racism, how could we expect that to change?

The Iraqi people keep proving their critics wrong. They say that democracy can’t take in Iraqi culture: yet Iraq had a larger turnout in their election than most American elections that don’t involve death threats against voters. We keep hearing how Iraqi Sunnis and Shi’ites hate each other and can never get along: yet most Iraqi tribes and families were mixed Sunni and Shi’ite before al-Qaeda began their brutal campaign of divide and conquer. We keep hearing about how Iraq will inevitably become a fundamentalist Muslim state: yet here we have Iraqi Muslims in a Catholic Church asking their Christian friends to come back home—for they will protect them.

Pictures like the ones that Yon brings from Baghdad remind me of the why I’m proud to stand in solidarity with the people of Iraq. I am offended by those arguments precisely because I see them as being tinged with a subtle yet corrosive racism: the argument that Iraqis can’t be free and democratic because of “culture” diminishes the notion that human rights are universal and innate. The arguments that Iraqis can’t be free because they haven’t “earned” their democracy diminishes the unimaginable suffering and the incredible bravery of many Iraqis. Even though these arguments are usually made without the intention of being arrogant, they ultimately are arrogant: they suggest that somehow we in the West are better than the people of Iraq. That we’re evolved enough to support democracy and the Iraqis are not.

We live in a sheltered culture of comfort, and yet we have the audacity to criticize people who have faced 30 years of utter tyranny followed by 4 years of terrorism. If any of us were to walk in the shoes of a typical Iraqi, would we be willing to do what they have done? We can barely get off the couch on Election Day, no less face terrorists who threaten to kill anyone who votes. Would we be as brave? Is our commitment to our democracy as strong as theirs?

The Iraqis have suffered greatly, but ultimately they are building a better future for themselves. Far from being a backwards culture doomed to fundamentalism and sectarianism, the people of Iraq demonstrate, hidden from our view, that their belief in democracy and freedom may sometimes be greater than our own.

The Devil We Know

The niece of Benazir Bhutto explains why Bhutto’s return is not a positive development for Pakistan:

Perhaps the most bizarre part of this circus has been the hijacking of the democratic cause by my aunt, the twice-disgraced former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. While she was hashing out a deal to share power with Gen. Pervez Musharraf last month, she repeatedly insisted that without her, democracy in Pakistan would be a lost cause. Now that the situation has changed, she’s saying that she wants Musharraf to step down and that she’d like to make a deal with his opponents — but still, she says, she’s the savior of democracy.

The reality, however, is that there is no one better placed to benefit from emergency rule than she is. Along with the leaders of prominent Islamic parties, she has been spared the violent retributions of emergency law. Yes, she now appears to be facing seven days of house arrest, but what does that really mean? While she was supposedly under house arrest at her Islamabad residence last week, 50 or so of her party members were comfortably allowed to join her. She addressed the media twice from her garden, protected by police given to her by the state, and was not reprimanded for holding a news conference. (By contrast, the very suggestion that they might hold a news conference has placed hundreds of other political activists under real arrest, in real jails.)

Ms. Bhutto’s political posturing is sheer pantomime. Her negotiations with the military and her unseemly willingness until just a few days ago to take part in Musharraf’s regime have signaled once and for all to the growing legions of fundamentalists across South Asia that democracy is just a guise for dictatorship.

Bhutto was ejected for Pakistan for massive corruption. She was growing rich at the expense of the Pakistani people, and there’s little reason to believe that all her noble words about democracy aren’t just a way of getting her hand back in the cookie jar.

As reprehensible as we find the idea of Musharraf’s emergency rule, we have to consider the alternatives. Benazir Bhutto was in power when Pakistan was providing support to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. She was kicked out of the country for corruption on a massive scale. It is uncertain that she could hold the country together in the face of rising Islamic extremism.

Pervez Musharraf, for all his flaws, has promised that there will be elections in January. He appears to be preparing for a crackdown on the al-Qaeda infested regions of Waziristan and the restive territories along the Afghan/Pakistan border. He has already worked towards reducing tensions with India over Kashmir.

As a general principle, what Musharraf is doing is wrong. Democracy should be a key principle of American foreign policy. However, we cannot ignore the reality that Pakistani democracy could lead to nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorist groups—or even a government willing to provoke India into a nuclear exchange. The level of Islamic radicalism in Pakistan could lead to a government more like Hamas than we can accept.

Musharraf, unfortunately, is the devil we know. We should be pushing him to end his emergency rule as soon as practicable, and to treat his people with respect and only minimize civil liberties as much as absolutely necessary. We should push him to help develop civil society in Pakistan and ensure that the Pakistani government does not succumb to the same endemic corruption that ended Bhutto’s government. However, looking at the situation in Pakistan, we have to consider that right now Musharraf’s interests are closely enough aligned with our own that to lose Musharraf would be to lose a stabilizing force in the region.

If all this reeks of realpolitik, that’s because it is. However, democratic idealism has its place, but not at the potential cost of a nuclear war in Central Asia. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for our foreign policy problems, which is why we must show flexibility in dealing with the Musharraf regime. We want a democratic Pakistan, but that must not mean allowing a Taliban-like regime to possess nuclear weapons. In this case, it is better to go with the devil we know rather than the one we do not.