Bush's not-so-impossible dream

The San Diego Union-Tribune

Robert Caldwell

To the many critics of the Bush administration's foreign policy, few of its goals have seemed more grandiose and implausible than defusing the explosive Middle East and the larger Islamic world by spreading democracy there.

To this criticism President Bush can offer a three-word rebuttal: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq.

However implausibly, these three heretofore barren grounds for the flowering of democratic governance are now being transformed by free elections. The consequences of this for 27 million Afghans, 4 million Palestinians and 25 million Iraqis are, quite simply, profound. They are hardly less so for the Arab/Islamic world and for American foreign policy.

In Afghanistan, a generation of ruinous war and autocracy has given way to a consensus choice via the ballot box – the election last October of a modernizing president, Hamid Karzai, who opposes terrorism and is a friend of the West.

In Palestine, a political moderate, Mahmoud Abbas, who renounces violence against Israelis, won nearly two-thirds of the popular vote Jan. 9 in a seven-candidate field to succeed the late Yasser Arafat as president of the Palestinian Authority. Abbas already appears close to achieving a cease-fire in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a hardliner not given to effusive expressions of optimism, is praising Abbas and hailing a potential "breakthrough" for peace.

In war-torn Iraq, today's election is making momentous history. Iraqis haven't had a competitive, multiparty election in half a century. The interim parliament elected today will write a national constitution that is to be submitted to voters later this year. A subsequent election at year's end would put in place a genuinely representative, democratic government for the first time since the creation of modern Iraq in 1922.

Today's election enfranchises Iraq's majority Shia and minority Kurds that together constitute 80 percent of Iraqis. That's a stunning accomplishment after decades of bloody suppression of these groups by Saddam Hussein. Iraq's Sunnis, long dominant under Saddam's dictatorship, will lose their whip hand – that's good – but still be assured of a significant role in the formulation of a new government. A carefully constructed system of checks and balances is in place to protect the rights of all major ethnic and religious factions.

Despite the current violence wrought by insurgents and terrorists murdering to stop democracy, Iraqis now have it in their power to build the Arab world's first democratic state. Should this bold experiment succeed in the very heart of the Arab Middle East, the electrifying example it sets for other Arabs could transform a region long locked in autocracy and backwardness; both breeding grounds for terrorism.

In fact, a wave of democratizing reform, or at least pressure for reform, has been washing over the region for years now.

In Iraq's neighbor Iran, the democratic and modernizing aspirations of younger Iranians in particular continue to challenge the reactionary theocratic power of that country's ruling mullahs. Around the shores of the Persian Gulf, oil-rich Arab states like Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar are experimenting with popularly elected legislatures and the creeping emancipation of women. Progressives within the Saudi royal family recognize that the kingdom must liberalize or risk pressures that could sweep away the Saud dynasty. Monarchist Jordan has a popularly elected parliament, women's rights and an expanding rule of law. Lebanon is partly democratic despite autocratic Syria's intrusive influence. Yemen, long one of the most backward places in the Arab world, now has an elected legislature.

A communications revolution, symbolized by the Al-Jazeera cable news network, is showing millions of Arabs an outside world full of alternative models for political and development options.

Note, too, that Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Jordan and Egypt are all U.S. allies, even if most opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It's true that popular sentiment in most of these Arab countries is distinctly, sometimes vociferously, anti-American these days. But that does not preclude the more favorable view that would emerge if a new, democratic Iraq succeeds and if the United States finally can broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Granted that these are huge ifs, but free elections are making them at least possible.

In the meantime, the winds of change are, indeed, blowing across a region that desperately needs alternatives to autocracy and stagnation. Even granting all that may yet go wrong, in Iraq and elsewhere, the Bush administration's vision of a region transformed by democratic reform is far less implausible than the naysaying skeptics imagine.