Posted by
Me on Sunday, July 16, 2006 11:56:46 PM
The folks over at NRO's The Corner have been
having a spirited debate about the efficacy of democratization as a
counterterrorism method in light of recent events in Lebanon. Andy
McCarthy started the debate by asking if fighting terrorism through democratization
migh be - and might have always been - a mistake.
"So now the Lebanese democracy can't control
Hezbollah (which has been freely elected and controls about a fifth of its legislature), while the
Palestinian Authority IS Hamas (the Palestinian people
having democratically put them in power)."
This is the same mistake I'm worried the administration has been willing to
make - the assumption that elections equals democracy. In either the 2002
NSS or the 2003 National Counterterrorism Strategy (I forget which - maybe
both), the administration broke states down into three categories: states that
were willing and able to fight terrorists operating within its borders (most
developed countries), states that, regardless of whether they were able,
weren't willing to fight terrorists operating within their borders (syria,
Iran, etc), and states that were willing, but not able to fight terrorists
operating within their borders. States such as the Philippines and
Indonesia fit into this last category. The Arroyo government in
Philippines got US help in going after Abu Sayyaf and other Islamic militants
operating in the south. Indonesia got US help in fighting Jemaah
Islamiya. For whatever reason, however, we never gave post-Cedar
Revolution Lebanon much help. True, perhaps they didn't want any, but I'm
willing to bet that the West more or less dropped Lebanon after it held large
demostrations and elected its own government. Lebanon may have been on
the road to being a democracy, but there was not much it could do to strengthen
itself enough to offer the services incumbent on any government - the same
services Hezbollah had been offering in the south of Lebanon to win over
support. This wasn't a failure of democracy to fight terrorism, it was a
failure to ensure a fledgling democracy move beyond elections and be able to
govern effectively.
This is a similar point Cliff May makes in a response
to McCarthy on The Corner.
And finally, yes, Hamas was elected,
but, no, that doesn’t mean Gaza and the West Bank are
“democratic.” Democracy requires the rule of law, an independent judiciary, a
free press, and many other attributes. If someone got
up on a soapbox in Gaza City tomorrow and said: “Vote
for me, I’m the peace candidate!” he’d be shot dead within an instant and
there’d be no arrest or trial. That’s not what happens
in a liberal democracy.
The discussion also touched on the way in which
democracy does (or does not) fight terrorism. McCarthy says the in response to a comment by John Podhoretz:
John, with due respect, terrorists have managed to strike
us, repeatedly, from within our own 230-year-old
democracy (where they have managed to plot for years without detection before
attacking). The beach heads for the 9/11 plot
were in Hamburg and Madrid. The current hotspots
are in London, Paris, Milan and Amsterdam. Check out yesterday's Wall
Street Journal op-ed by Swapan Dasgupta about
India's emerging t errorist nightmare — it's homegrown.
McCarthy came to my school earlier this year to talk, along with two
professors from the law school, about the legal aspect of the war on
terror. At the end of his talk, however, he brought out this same
argument. I thought this then, and this new debate reminds me: McCarthy
is arguing against something of a strawman here. The contention has never
been that terrorists can not live, plan and operate within the borders of a
democracy. I live in a democracy, but if I decided that I wanted to go
kill some people, the fact that I voted last Novemeber in an election will not
stop the thought from running through my head. McCarthy continues knocking down straw-men:
"On the other hand, selling democratization as a complete,
self-contained response to terrorism is nothing beyond a more
appealing manifestation of the regnant political correctness that
induces us to call this enterprise the "war on terror" lest we
offend anyone by mentioning who the enemy is"
This,
has really never been the case. Even with its commitment to
democratization, therefore, the administration has not ended
counterterrorist operations. I don't even know if there is an official
count of the number of countries in which US forces are either killing
terrorists themselves or teaching the local forces how to kill
terrorists (again, back to Philippines and Indonesia like I mentioned
above). The
focus of democratization is not, and never has been, on the terrorists
themselves. Democracy is
not going to change how they think or act. The trick is to find a way
to decrease their support; to make it easier for us to get at the
terrorists to root them out.
In his
book The Case for Democracy,
Natan Sharansky delineates between two
segments of the population in what he calls a "Fear Society:" the true
believers and those who have no alternative. The focus of
democratization, therefore, should not be on the "true believers," the
terrorists themselves, but rather on the general populace, and how to
decrease its support for the terrorists so as to make it easier for the
military to clean up. There's the administration's claim that
democracies allow an alternative to terrorism as a forum for letting
out ones grievances, political ambitions, etc. I think there is a
great deal of truth to this, but I also think it has a lot to do with
something a lot more simple: access to the necessities for everyday
survival. So much of the support enjoyed by Islamic fundamentalist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah comes from their ability to provide basic services for those willing to support them. Where the dysfunctional Middle Eastern state fails so miserably in providing the basic services that, as a state s government, it should be obligated to provide for its people, the mosque steps in and fulfills that role. As a result, the people's allegiance is transferred from the state to to mosque or Islamist group.
There is no doubt, however, that
democracies, even somewhat weak ones, govern better than authoritarian
regimes. The following is an excerpt from my thesis that I wrote on
the same
subject.
"For the handful of examples of authoritarian
states successfully promoting economic development and
democratization, there have been significantly more authoritarian states
that have sustained sub-par economic growth and little
sign of political liberalization. In fact, the
record indicates that low-income countries would be better served skipping the
authoritarian stage and democratizing instead.
Low-income democracies and democratizing states have
“outperformed their authoritarian counterparts on a full range
of development indicators…including life expectancy,
literacy, access to clean drinking water, agricultural
productivity, infant mortality."
Since a democratic regime is beholden to the entire population, and not
just the political, ethnic or economic faction that put it in power, it is
forced to provide services to the entire population. When the average
citizen is forced to support a certain movement or group because it provides
medical services or clothing for his children, his support will not transfer
back to the central government until he is sure that government can provide the
same services. Authoritarian governments do not have the track record of
being able to provide there services - or, indeed, being willing to provide
these services to those not in the specific political or ethnic groups it
counts on for protection and loyalty.
If you were to put a democratic regime in government as opposed to an
authoritarian one, a democratic regime that was at the point where it could
provide these services to its people, you can bet support for the terrorist
groups would decline sharply. A terrorist group that loses its support
among the public is left open and exposed to the states military and police
forces. No longer can terrorists hide among the local population and
count on those people to keep silent about who among them is a terrorist and
who isn't. With this, they lose one of their most effective weapons -
being able to cause the world to question the government's position on the
moral high ground because it is forced to bomb indiscriminately - civilian and
terrorist alike - because they can't tell who is who.
No one argues it is a cure-all. Democracy does not eliminate the need for
a military response to bomb the hell out of the bad guys. Democracy does,
however, make it far more easy to implement this military response, b/c people
are increasingly willing to point out who the bad guys are. Democracy
does not affect the terrorist response so much as it affects the response of
the rest of the population.
One last thing: McCarthy raises the (legitimate) question
of whether we really want to see democracies in places like Egypt and Saudi
Arabia given the likely alternative. Unfortunately this is true - but
only because so many of those arguing against democratization have made it true
(I don't intend this as an attack on McCarthy - I have no idea what his
position has been on this subject over the years). The reason this is the
likely outcome in these states is because of decades of American support for
dictators. While there is little we can do about that now, if the United
States continues to support oppressive dictators rather than liberal democrats,
it will make this drawback to democracy a self-fulfilling prophecy. It
will not promote democracy because uncertainty about what the outcome will be
necessitates supporting "friendly" dictators, while the supposrt for
these dictators will create the conditions whereby the outcome will be too
uncertain to allow for democracy promotion.