From
Tyranny to Freedom
Democracy in Iraq Has Precedent
Michael A. Ledeen
April 7, 2004 1:00 am | National Review Online
April 7, 2004 1:00 am | National Review Online
Recent acts of barbarism against Coalition forces in Iraq have revived an
old and enormously important debate: Are these terrorists the products of
fanatic tyrannies, or are the tyrannies the logical expression of the true
nature of the peoples of the region?
This is not an academic exercise, for many argue that our foreign policy
depends on the answer. If we believe that the barbarism is the result of the
likes of Saddam Hussein and the Iranian mullahs, then the war against terrorism
should concentrate on regime change. Once the tyrants are removed, the terrorists
will be deprived of their sustenance, and greater freedom and democracy can be
expected. But, it is said, if fanaticism and barbarism are intrinsically part
and parcel of the region’s culture, mere regime change cannot possibly
eliminate this sort of terrorism. Some way would have to be found to change the
culture, and only then could terrorism be truly defeated and a political
transformation succeed.
It is an ancient and highly instructive debate. It is featured in the book
of Exodus in a lively confrontation between Moses and the Almighty. In one of
the many uprisings against Moses, the Jews demand new leaders who will lead
them back to Egypt. God reacts with disgust, tells Moses that these people are
unworthy of the Divine mission, and announces his intention to kill all but a
small remnant, the few people deserving of freedom and the Holy Land. Moses
insists that they can be taught, and achieves a compromise: They will be
spared, but will have to remain in the wilderness for 40 years. Thereafter a new
generation will create Israel. Were the rebellious Jews created by Egyptian
tyranny, or were they the sort of people who preferred tyranny to freedom?
The newly freed Egyptian slaves were not quickly transformed into
freedom-loving democrats, despite their exceptional leaders. But in time they
and their children learned the habits of mind of free people.
The greatest modern political thinker, Nicolò Machiavelli, observed that it
is as difficult to bring freedom to a people accustomed to tyranny as it is to
crush freedom in a free society. Yet Machiavelli knew that both had been
accomplished, even though he took a very dim view of human nature (“man is more
inclined to do evil than to do good”).
At the end of the Second World War, the leaders of the Great Generation
pondered the disposition of Germany and Japan. Many believed it was impossible
to bring freedom to people who had embraced fascism and its attendant culture
of death (from Japanese suicide bombers in their kamikaze aircraft to SS
fighters on the ground celebrating heroic death). The celebrated George F.
Kennan, then the chief of the State Department’s policy-planning staff, was
convinced that there were no potential democratic leaders in Germany, and that
we should retain the Nazi bureaucracy. At least they knew how to manage a
modern state. And in Japan, many of our wisest men insisted that the only hope
for Japanese democracy was the total extirpation of the Imperial culture; the
Emperor had to go.
But there were democrats in Germany who proved excellent leaders of a free
country, and the emperor still sits on his throne in democratic Japan.
To those who say that democracy cannot be introduced in the Muslim Middle
East, where it has never existed, there is an easy answer: If that were true,
then there would be no democracy at all, since tyranny is older than democracy,
and oppression has been far more common than freedom for most of human history.
We all lived under tyranny before we became free; freedom has had to be wrested
from the hands of kings, caliphs and nobles, and imams and priests–and it has
invariably been a tough battle. But that is quite different from saying it
cannot be done at all.
The history of the Muslim world abounds with example of successful
self-government, from the high degree of autonomy granted to some of the lands
of the Ottoman Empire to the remarkably modern Iranian Constitution of 1906,
and the contemporary Middle East is currently bubbling with calls for greater
freedom, often from surprising sources (such as the son of Libyan tyrant
Muammar Khaddafi). It is hard to believe that the peoples of the Middle East
are bound and determined to remain oppressed, when millions of Iranians have
demonstrated for freedom, and, just within the past few months, pro-democracy
demonstrations have erupted in Saudi Arabia and Syria.
Yet those in Iraq who are killing us and our allies, along with Arab
civilians–and even themselves and their own children–are also part of the
culture of the Middle East, and they draw upon it to justify their actions and
inspire others to do likewise. Do we not have to change at least those elements
of the region’s culture? Can we expect to defeat terrorism without also
discrediting the ideas and passions that underlie it? And does that not
automatically mean a long process, in which political and military weapons are
largely irrelevant?
I do not think so. Nothing so discredits an idea as its defeat in the real
world. Had we not defeated the fascists in World War II, the heirs of Tojo, Hitler,
and Mussolini would most likely still rule Japan, Germany, and Italy, and some
version of fascism would most likely remain a potent force in many other
societies, just as it was in the Twenties, Thirties and early Forties. But our
victory in war defeated both the enemy regimes and their evil doctrines, and
fascism is no longer an inspiration. If we defeat the terrorists and remove the
regimes that support them, we are likely to find the appeal of bloody jihad
dramatically reduced. There is undoubtedly a connection between the
pro-democracy demonstrations (and Libya’s surrender) and the liberation of
Afghanistan and Iraq.
The barbarians in Fallujah are part of a culture that is both bloody and
peaceful, just like the Western culture that produced fascism and communism.
The central issue in this war is which elements in that culture will prevail.
You do not have to be a Hegelian to believe that ideas rise and fall with the
people that embrace them, or that culture is linked to the success and failure
of its advocates. We may not know the answer to the academic question: whether
the culture favored tyrants or if the tyrants imposed a culture favorable to
their domination. But we do know the answer to the policy question: tyranny and
terror, along with the culture that favors them, can be defeated, to the
benefit of freedom and even democracy.
Michael A. Ledeen holds the Freedom Chair at
AEI.
This article was found online at:https://www.aei.org/publication/from-tyranny-to-freedom
__________________________
Revolution.
Freedom, our
most lethal weapon against tyranny.
By Michael Ledeen — March 1, 2005
Some ancient Chinese philosopher is said to have taught his students that
one cannot understand an event simply by attempting to reconstruct a chain of
causality leading up to it. Instead, one must immerse oneself in the context,
to fully understand the moment in which the event took place. If you get the
context right, you can understand what came before and what comes after.
That sort of understanding is important both for historians and leaders.
If that ancient wise man were alive today and were asked to summarize the
unique characteristics of this historical moment, he would say “revolution.” We
are living in a revolutionary age, that started more than a quarter century ago
in Spain after the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. At that time,
hardly anyone believed it possible to go from dictatorship to democracy without
great violence, and most Spaniards feared that the terrible civil war of the
1930s–which ended when Franco seized power and installed a military
dictatorship–would begin anew. Instead, thanks to a remarkable generation of
political leaders, some savvy priests, and the grossly underrated King Juan
Carlos, Spain passed smoothly and gracefully into democracy.
It was the beginning of the Age of the Second Democratic Revolution. Spain
inspired Portugal, and the second Iberian dictatorship gave way to democracy.
Spain and Portugal inspired all of Latin America, and by the time Ronald Reagan
left office there were only two unelected governments south of the Rio Grande:
Cuba and Surinam. These successful revolutions inspired the Soviet satellites,
and then the Soviet Union itself, and the global democratic revolution reached
into Africa and Asia, even threatening the tyrants in Beijing.
The United States played a largely positive role in almost all these
revolutions, thanks to a visionary president–Ronald Reagan–and a generation of
other revolutionary leaders in the West: Walesa, Havel, Thatcher, John Paul II,
Bukovsky, Sharansky, among others.
There was then a pause for a dozen years, first during the presidency of
Bush the Elder, who surrounded himself with short-sighted self-proclaimed
“realists” and boasted of his lack of “the vision thing,” and then the reactionary
Clinton years, featuring a female secretary of state who danced with dictators.
Having led a global democratic revolution, and won the Cold War, the United
States walked away from that revolution. We were shocked into resuming our
unfinished mission by the Islamofascists, eight months into George W. Bush’s
first term, and we have been pursuing that mission ever since.
The parallels between the first and second waves of revolution would be
very interesting to the Chinese sage. During the Reagan years, the revolution
began on the periphery of the major conflict, in Iberia. Following 9/11, the
revolution was brought violently to the periphery of the Middle East, in
Afghanistan. It swept through Iraq, taking time to liberate Ukraine (against
whose independence Bush the Elder spoke so shamefully), and now threatens
Syrian hegemony over Lebanon, if not the Syrian regime itself, and has forced
the Egyptian and Saudi regimes to at least a pretense of democratic change.
While most of the revolutions have been accomplished with a minimum of
armed force, military power has been used on several of the battlefields, and
not only in the recent cases of Afghanistan and Iraq. It is often said that the
Cold War was won without firing a shot, but that is false; there was fighting
in Afghanistan, and in Grenada, and in Angola. The repeated defeats of Soviet
proxies (Angola, Grenada) and the Red Army itself (Afghanistan) were important
in shattering the myth that the laws of history guaranteed the ultimate triumph
of communism. Once that myth had been destroyed, the peoples of the Soviet
Empire lost their paralyzing fear of the Kremlin, and they risked a direct
challenge.
In like manner, the defeats of the fanatics in Afghanistan and Iraq,
followed by free elections in both countries, destroyed two myths: of the
inevitability of tyranny in the Muslim world, and of the divinely guaranteed
success of the jihad. Once those myths were shattered, others in the region
lost their fear of the tyrants, and they are now risking a direct challenge.
The Cedar Revolution in Beirut has now toppled Syria’s puppets in Lebanon, and
I will be surprised and disappointed if we do not start hearing from democratic
revolutionaries inside Syria–echoed from their counterparts in Iran–in the near
future.
Many of the brave people in the suddenly democratic Arab streets are
inspired by America, and by George W. Bush himself. It should go without saying
that we must support them all, in as many ways as we can. Most of that support
will be political–from unwavering support by all our top officials, to support
for radio and television stations, and tens of thousands of bloggers, who can
provide accurate information about the real state of affairs within the Middle
Eastern tyrannies, to financial assistance to workers so that they can go on
strike–but some might be military, such as hitting terror camps where the mass
murderers of the region are trained. We are, after all, waging war against the
terrorists and their masters, as is proven by the daily carnage in Iraq and
Israel, and the relentless oppression and murder of democrats in Iran.
The president clearly understands this, but, in one of the most frustrating
paradoxes of the moment, this vision is rather more popular among the peoples
of the Middle East than among some of our top policymakers. For anyone to
suggest to this president at this dramatic moment, that he should offer a
reward to Iran for promising not to build atomic bombs, or that we should seek
a diplomatic “solution” to Syria’s oft-demonstrated role in the terror war
against our friends and our soldiers, is a betrayal of his vision and of the
Iranian, Israeli, Lebanese and Syrian people. Yet that sort of reactionary
thinking is surprisingly widespread, from leading members of congressional committees,
from the failed “experts” at State and CIA, and even some on the staff of the
National Security Council.
Our most lethal weapon against the tyrants is freedom, and it is now
spreading on the wings of democratic revolution. It would be tragic if we
backed off now, when revolution is gathering momentum for a glorious victory.
We must be unyielding in our demand that the peoples of the Middle East design
their own polities, and elect their own leaders. The first step, as it has been
in both Afghanistan and Iraq, is a national referendum to choose the form of
government. In Iran, the people should be asked if they want an Islamic
republic. In Syria, if they want a Baathist state. In Egypt and Saudi Arabia
and Libya, if they want more of the same. We should not be deterred by the
cynics who warn that freedom will make things worse, because the ignorant
masses will opt for the fantasmagorical caliphate of the increasingly
irrelevant Osama bin Laden. Mubarak and Qadaffi and Assad and Khamenei are
arresting democrats, not Islamists, and the women of Saudi Arabia are not
likely to demand to remain shrouded for the rest of their lives.
Faster, please. The self-proclaimed experts have been wrong for
generations. This is a revolutionary moment. Go for it.
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