SEVEN EXCUSES FOR RESISTING REFORM IN THE ARAB WORLD
by Amir Taheri
Gulf News
December 22, 2004

The State Department has already downgraded the vision into a "project" to be pursued through classic bureaucratic channels.

For their part, Arab leaders, and their western apologists, advance seven excuses for resisting even minimal reform of dysfunctional systems in most Arab countries. These need to be examined if the region is not to miss an historic opportunity for change.

The first excuse is that economic development must precede political change. This version of Marxian dialectics is based on the premise that the creation of a modern economic infrastructure would, in time, lead to the emergence of a democratic political superstructure.

Experience, however, shows that political change inspires economic development, not the other way round.

Breaking with the past

China opened the path to economic development after it abandoned rigid Marxist-Leninist politics. India's break with five decades of socialist-style policies made its current economic boom possible.

There are limits to economic development in totalitarian and authoritarian societies that cannot be transcended without political change.

Almost all Arab societies have reached the limits of economic development within the various forms of authoritarianism that marks their politics. Without political reform none can go much further economically, regardless of the volume of aid that anyone may wish to provide.

The second excuse is that democracy is a western system and hard to sell to the Arabs. The fact, however, is that of the 130 nations now classified as democratic more than half cannot be described as western by any standard.

Democracy is a form of government, not an ideology or, even less, a religious faith. It works in Japan and South Korea as well as Norway and Senegal.

The minimum that Arab regimes could do is to stop violating their own constitutions, and accept free elections instead of plebiscites in which the official candidate wins with 99.99 per cent of the votes.

The third excuse: most Arabs are poor and cannot understand democracy, let alone practise it. But the fact is that the average income per head per annum in most Arab countries today is higher than in India which is the world's largest democracy.

The average Libyan earns 20 times more than his Senegalese counterpart, and is certainly richer than the average Briton in the 19th century who, nevertheless, lived in a democracy.

In some cases the state's control of a nation's chief source of revenue, notably oil, or foreign aid, enables it to bribe some would-be critics and terrorise the rest of the population into submission.

The fourth excuse: democracy would require the Arabs to abandon cherished ancestral values and traditions. This may well be true. But the mere fact of something being done by many people for a long time does not exempt it from critical examination.

The fifth excuse is that, because most Arabs are afflicted by illiteracy, reform should first focus on education. But this is a red herring. The high percentage of illiterate people in India and Bangladesh has not prevented them from taking the path of democracy.

In 19th century Britain more than half of the population couldn't read and write but were not deprived of basic human rights.

Most Arab states spend lots of money on education. And yet the percentage of the illiterate in their population has either remained constant or increased in the past decade.

The claim that education is the key to democratisation is bogus. The peoples of the USSR were among the best educated but had virtually no civic rights.

The sixth excuse is that democracy cannot be imposed by force. This is a diversion because no one wants to impose democracy by force on an unwilling population. Some Arabs claim that this is the case in Afghanistan and, closer to them, in Iraq which is scheduled to hold its first free elections next month.

But what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq was not an imposition of democracy by force. It was the removal by force of impediments to democratisation.

Under the Taliban and the Saddamites neither Afghanistan nor Iraq could choose democratisation. Forcible regime change was necessary to give the Afghans and the Iraqis a choice.

They now have that choice, and may, although this is improbable, end up by rejecting democracy and choosing despotism once again. The important point is that they were given a choice.

The seventh excuse is, perhaps, the most disingenuous. It is based on the claim that there can be no democratisation in Arab countries until the Palestine-Israel problem is solved.

For half a century Arab regimes of all denomination have used the issue to justify their despotic rule. They have had a direct interest in preventing a peaceful solution of the problem which, in a sense, they helped create in 1947 when they rejected the United Nations' partition of Palestine.

Bush should have the courage of his statements, if not his convictions. He should tell the despots that the world has changed and that they can no longer rely on American support to stay in power against the wishes of their people.

For decades they were able to take the Americans for a ride by claiming that Arab despotism produced stability, a commodity that Washington appreciated.

Now, however, we know that the stability they produced was akin to the stillness of swamps where the insects of terrorism breed.

The Arab peoples have known for a long time that the stability of the status quo was killing them. It is time the United States, too, recognised that the same status quo also kills Americans.

Amir Taheri is an Iranian author and journalist based in Europe, and a member of Benador Associates