By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Maybe stability isn't such a bad thing after all.
As the refugees continue to stream across the
Mediterranean and southeastern Europe, it's worth remembering that for many
years stability was considered the problem. In his second inaugural address in
2005, George W. Bush enunciated an understanding of tyranny that had become common
after the shock of the 9/11 terrorist attacks:
We have seen
our vulnerability — and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole
regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny — prone to ideologies
that feed hatred and excuse murder — violence will gather, and multiply in
destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal
threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred
and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of
the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.
While most people want to blame the Iraq War and all the
subsequent turmoil on him, Bush was merely channeling an increasingly common
disgust with the way business was done in the Middle East. For decades, a
realist foreign policy consensus forged during the Cold War had made America
and the nations of the West partners with thugs and tyrants across the region.
We had empowered He-man porn addict Saddam Hussein, clothes-obsessive Moammar
Gadhafi, Soviet hold-over Hosni Mubarak, and the transparently wicked Bashar
al-Assad.
The result was a region characterized by underdeveloped
resource-economies, religious fundamentalism, and strife. That anger, channeled
outward, resulted in terrorism. The Sept. 11 attacks were the shock that
finally got us to question the decades-old assumption that stable tyrannies
were the best we could expect in the Middle East.
To many, this felt like a near religious revelation about
history. This feeling never went away and received a huge boost from the Arab
Spring. Here's George W. Bush again, speaking in 2012: "The idea that Arab
people are somehow content with oppression has been discredited forever."
In the same speech:
"Some look
at the risks inherent in democratic change — particularly in the Middle East
and North Africa — and find the dangers too great. America, they argue, should
be content with supporting the flawed leaders they know in the name of
stability," he said. "But in the long run, this foreign-policy
approach is not realistic. It is not realistic to presume that so-called
stability enhances our national security. Nor is it within the power of America
to indefinitely preserve the old order, which is inherently unstable."
There's a facile logic to this, of course. Yes, it was
beyond the power of America to preserve the old order indefinitely. No set of
regimes is preserved indefinitely. And we weren't doing the work anyway. Mostly
we relied on the self-interest of the regimes to do the heavy lifting, and
often American commitments to these governments were minimal or transactional
in nature. It was partly the sterile, abstract nature of these relationships
that made them seem so sordid to officials who had become fascinated by
revolutionary violence, and the possibility of dramatic regional change.
That change, under Bush, would be initiated by an
American-led domino theory of spreading democracy. Or, under President Obama, a
series of lightly tended domestic revolutions called the Arab Spring. Hillary
Clinton was just as enamored with the idea of change as Bush, but thought she
had discovered a low-investment way of achieving it in Libya: Smart Power. Just
a few bombs and the old powers come tumbling down.
In Egypt, we simply backed away from an old ally in
Mubarak and watched democratic forces undo him, only to be undone themselves.
In Syria, the U.S. political class spent years talking up the possibility of
"moderate rebels." The qualifying adjective was by then necessary,
because some Americans had realized that not all Middle Eastern paramilitaries
were devoted to Lockean conceptions of liberty. We covertly aided and extended
that civil war. Perhaps another dictator would fall off the list of realism's
dishonorable compromises.
Imagine traveling back to 2003 and discussing current
events with a hawk who had been converted to the Bushian faith. If he knew that
by 2015 Hussein's regime would be totally deconstructed, that Mubarak would
fall victim to a popular uprising, that Gadhafi would fall victim to another
popular uprising, and that Assad would be in the fight of his life, he would be
jumping out of his seat for joy.
Until you told him the details.
Instead of finding that Middle Eastern Muslims
universally aspire to Western forms of liberty, we've discovered that a
significant number of children of Muslim immigrants in the West aspire to cut
off the heads of infidels and enslave women in the Levant. The 2006 elections
in Palestine brought Hamas to power. ISIS controls significant portions of
Syria and Iraq. ISIS operates freely in Libya, and even Egypt. Basically,
everywhere America goes, ISIS rushes in and starts killing people, sometimes
with American-supplied weapons the group has stolen.
Middle Eastern Christians look like they are going
through a final genocide. Other religious minorities throughout
"liberated" Iraq are being enslaved and raped. The Syrian civil war
continues with no end even imaginable. A refugee crisis unlike any seen since
World War II is sweeping tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of displaced
people from the Middle East to Europe. In response to expressions of European
sympathy, Assad seems to be increasing the threats to his domestic enemies,
hoping Germany will absorb his problem people. And the onrush of unchecked and
unvetted human movement to Europe is inspiring a right-wing backlash and
possibly scuttling the Schengen treaty guaranteeing free movement on the
continent.
Fourteen years ago, we looked at decades of Middle
Eastern "stability" purchased through dirty deals and felt disgusted.
Now that we've had 14 years of idealism about revolutionary change, combined
with romanticism about the democratic forces on the ground, are we any happier?
Bush and others said that the West could not sustain the old order even if it
desired to do so, that it was inherently unstable. But it turns out we can't
guide the process of destruction and reformation to our desired ends either.
For some reason, a world that is boiling over in violence
and cut-throat theocracy makes me nostalgic for the days it was merely
"simmering in resentment and tyranny."
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