The upheavals in the Muslim world today are at once civil and geopolitical. The geopolitical conflicts can erupt into religious war; religious conflicts can escalate into civil war; civil wars can overflow borders and become geopolitical. This protea
Renaming the conflict that has embroiled the US and the West since 9/11 might shake loose the misunderstandings that shroud it. For neither political thought nor policy can address a complex phenomenon until words begin to disclose its essential contours. President Bush stays the semantic course with democracy-vs-tyranny and freedom-vs-terror. His words articulate a consistent policy, but they obscure the conflict it is meant to address. The original miscalculations in Iraq stemmed from the belief that since democracy is the opposite of tyranny, a people who have suffered tyranny will embrace democracy as soon as benevolent foreigners remove their tyrant. Regime change is another still-repeated keyword from the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions. The US rejected the idea of diplomatic discussions with Iran and Syria to address the Lebanon crisis because, in the president’s words, the US is more concerned with"form of government" than "stability."
This vocabulary has exhausted itself. First of all, the countries that count as America’s allies, like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, are not democratic regimes or even on a definite path toward liberalization. The invasion of Iraq was supposed to awaken democratic aspirations within these autocracies, but the oppositional movements are coming not from liberal reformers and democrats, but from Sunni radicals and jihadists with increasing populist appeal. Pakistan’s Musharraf regime, the West’s most important ally in the struggle against Al Qaeda and the effort to sustain some sort of non-totalitarian regime in Afghanistan, is not only not democratic, but its president walks a tightrope between cooperating with the US and placating his own military and internal-security apparatus, which have strong ties with, precisely, Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Second, the less-than-sovereign weak states, including Iraq, the Palestinian Authority, Lebanon, and Afghanistan, are the current sites of radical Islamist mobilizations and terrorism. The fatal flaw in US policy has been its neglect of civil order as a foundation of sovereignty and democracy, first in Afghanistan and Iraq and then in Lebanon, where the US, along with Europe and the United Nations, was lulled while watching the televised Cedar Revolution into letting Hezbollah’s arms buildup sabotage Lebanon’s sovereignty and Israel’s security. Finally, the Iraq intervention was predicated on the fallacy that instability would foster progressive political change, but regional instability has thus far emboldened anti-democratic forces that now vie for supremacy.
John Brenkman, distinguished professor at the City University of New York, directs the U.S.-Europe Seminar at Baruch College. He lives in New York and Paris. His next book,The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy: Political Thought in the Age of Geo-CivilWar will be published by Princeton University Press in 2007. Rights: © 2006 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization.YaleGlobal Online