Democracy is taking a beating. The Honduran military has sent its leftist president into exile. The Iranian government is suppressing the Green Revolution. China arrested prominent dissident Liu Xiaobo. And Governor Mark Sanford decided that he could best serve the interests of his South Carolinian constituents by hightailing it after his Argentinean mistress.
So, what happened to the inevitable wave of democracy reaching every shore? After “people power” dislodged tyrants in the Philippines, South Africa, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere, pundits predicted that democracy would soon spread around the world as universally as Coca-Cola and iPods. Opinion-makers on the left celebrated the victories of self-determination as a key legacy of the Enlightenment. Opinion-makers on the right embraced the neoconservatives’ “democracy promotion” tactics. Even normally pessimistic realists in the center, who prefer stability to the unpredictability of regime change from below, began to sing paeans to democratization.
Yes, you could find a few people still willing to embrace Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe or King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. But these leaders seemed like holdouts from another age about to be toppled by modern democracy’s more nimble Tweeters and bloggers. It was just a matter of time.
Someone forgot to break this news to the ruling elite in Tehran. After the initial huge outpouring of protest in Iran following the disputed presidential election results, the militia and riot police have moved quickly to break up demonstrations and arrested hundreds. Don’t expect the partial recount of votes to produce much of anything. More effective would be a challenge from billionaire pistachio merchant and former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who has sharply criticized the government’s handling of the elections and, rumor has it, has decamped to Qom to intrigue with the clerics there.
The more conspiratorially minded see the hand of the United States behind the uprising in Iran. The CIA, which has a track record from 1953, is likely skulking around over there. The U.S. government has made no bones about its dislike of Ahmadinejad. And the Bush administration funded various groups inside Iran bent on regime change.
This connecting of the dots is hogwash, writes Foreign Policy In Focus senior analyst Stephen Zunes. “There is something profoundly ethnocentric in arguing that civil insurrections and other pro-democracy campaigns have to be launched from Washington and that Iranians (like Eastern Europeans) are incapable of organizing a popular movement on their own,” he writes in Iran’s Do-It-Yourself Revolution.
Given the U.S. track record in Iran and the indigenous nature of the current uprising, the Obama administration can best promote change in Iran by not actively promoting change. Writes FPIF contributor Max Burns, “Openly providing support to Mousavi supporters as some hawks advocate would doom the entire movement, which the Obama administration keenly understands. A strong American hand in Iranian affairs will be counterproductive and dangerously naïve. Ahmadinejad’s regime thrives on just such acts as a premise for further isolation. World criticism counterintuitively strengthens the paranoia of Ahmadinejad’s claims.”
We progressives tend to believe that things get better over time. As Martin Luther King, Jr., once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” The election of Barack Obama confirms that a measure of justice comes to those who struggle for it. But the racial wealth divide in this country remains as galling as ever. So how long must we wait? After all, as the considerably less utopian thinker John Maynard Keynes once said, “in the long run, we are all dead.”
So which will come first for the world: death or democracy? Perhaps, if we somehow avoid rising waters, declining economies, and the ravages of sectarianism, we will discover at long last that the arc of the universe bends toward democracy. But, as Mark Sanford’s antics indicate, the democracy we get might only be the democracy we deserve.
Intel, Iraq, and Françafrique
Today is the deadline for U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraqi cities. But don’t expect a great deal to change. “The original intent of moving troops out of the cities was to reduce the U.S. military role and send the message to Iraqis that the United States would be leaving the country soon,” write FPIF policy outreach director Erik Leaver and FPIF contributor Daniel Atzmon in A Withdrawal in Name Only. “But troops that are no longer sleeping in the cities will still take part in operations within Iraqi cities; they will serve in ‘support’ and ‘advisory’ roles, rather than combat functions. Such ‘reclassification’ of troops as military trainers is another example of how the United States is circumventing the terms of the SOFA agreement.”
We were also promised a lot of changes in the U.S. intelligence policy during the Obama administration. There’s been some movement forward on torture policy and Guantánamo. “Yet although he has criticized the Bush administration for ‘politicizing’ the country’s intelligence apparatus and sanctioning coercive methods of interrogation, the new president has made only minimal substantive change in the U.S. intelligence community,” writes Erin Fitzgerald in A New Approach to Intelligence?
The United States isn’t the only country meddling overseas. In Africa, France has propped up dictatorship for decades. “France meticulously devised its decolonization policy to tie the vested interests of handpicked native governors with French national interest,” writes FPIF contributor Khadija Sharife in Propping Up Africa’s Dictators. “France drew up secretive defense agreements, which are still active today, that authorized it to legally maintain military bases in Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Togo, Cameroon, Djibouti, the Central African Republic, Senegal, and other countries. These bases facilitated direct French military intervention, which dictators feared could be used for them as much as against them.”
Finally, in honor of Twitter, we are re-launching our 60-Second Expert feature. We know you don’t have a lot of time. So here are condensed versions of some recent articles: Stephen Zunes on democracy in the Middle East and R.S. Zaharna on U.S.-Muslim relations. 60-Second Expert: it’s more than a tweet but less than a treatise.