December 10, 2012 | National Post

Jeane Kirkpatrick Goes to Tahrir Square — Two starkly Different Visions of the Arab Spring

December 10, 2012 | National Post

Jeane Kirkpatrick Goes to Tahrir Square — Two starkly Different Visions of the Arab Spring

Thirty-three years ago, Commentary magazine published an article by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick that stands as one of the most influential essays in the history of American foreign policy.

The subject of Dictatorships & Double Standards was the failure of Jimmy Carter’s policies in Central America, Africa and the Middle East. But if you change just a few of the words — “communist” to “Islamist” — the article yields an eerily coherent critique of the Obama administration’s policy on the Arab Spring.

The Carter administration, Kirkpatrick complained, “actively collaborated in the replacement of moderate autocrats friendly to American interests with less friendly autocrats of extremist persuasion.”

The leaders whom America had abandoned (Somoza and the Shah back in 1979, but think Mubarak in 2012) “enjoyed long tenure, large personal fortunes … and good relations with the United States. [They sent] their sons and others to be educated in our universities, voting with us in the United Nations, and regularly supporting American interests and positions even when these entailed personal and political cost.” Their replacements, on the other hand, embraced explicitly anti-American ideologies.

Yes, “both Somoza and the Shah were, in central ways, traditional rulers of semi-traditional societies.” But before being abandoned by the West, they held their nations together against the threat of destructive revolutionary, totalitarian forces.

Standing up for “traditional” tyrants could, in a way, amount to standing up for (eventual) democracy, Kirkpatrick argued. That’s because: “The history of this century provides no grounds for expecting that radical totalitarian regimes will transform themselves [into liberal states]. At the moment, there is a far greater likelihood of progressive liberalization and democratization in the [traditionally autocratic] governments of Brazil, Argentina, and Chile than in the government of Cuba; in Taiwan than in the People’s Republic of China; in South Korea than in North Korea; in Zaire than in Angola; and so forth.”

The upshot, she argued, was that America should stand up for “traditional” autocracies, jackboots and all, because the totalitarian alternatives were even worse.

***

Jeanne Kirkpatrick died in 2006. But her doctrine survives. Indeed, it was very much a podium presence at Thursday’s Washington Forum on “Dictators and Dissidents,” put on by the D.C.-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). During the “Islamists and Elections” panel, which turned out to be the highlight of the day-long program, Wall Street Journal deputy editor Bret Stephens cited the Reagan-era foreign policy advisor by name, in sweeping aside any suggestion that “moderate” Islamists may bring democracy and rule of law to Egypt.

“There were ‘moderate’ Nazis,” he told the crowd “Albert Speer was one of them. But he was still a Nazi.”

Nor does Stephens have much faith in the Tahrir Square “liberals” whom the Western media is so fond of lionizing. “When you meet liberals in the Arab world, they tend to be nauseating — people who learned their ‘liberalism’ from Noam Chomsky,” he said. Much of his speech was dedicated to a tearing down of the hopeful, once-popular notion that a bunch of allegedly freedom-loving Arab teenagers putting protest pictures of each other on Facebook, Youtube and Google can compete with the ruthless power hunger of the Muslim Brotherhood.

With the Mubaraks of the Middle East discredited, and the Islamists taking the region on the road to totalitarianism, whom should the United States support? Stephens’ very Kirkpatrickinist answer: “Monarchy is looking better and better. The model should be Morocco.” After a few decades under a traditional king, Stephens imagines (“20 or 30 years” was his estimate), the people might be ready for democracy. But not now.

The leading anti-Kirkpatrickinist on the Washington Forum panel was FDD Senior Fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Middle Eastern CIA bureau chief with an encyclopedia knowledge of regional politics.

Unlike Stephens, Gerecht takes it for granted that in the post-Arab Spring environment, elections are unavoidable. And given the modern state of Arab politics and culture, it is inevitable that Islamist parties, of some stripe or other, will win.

To argue otherwise, he said, is to embrace the Turkish-originated notion of Kemalism — that secular “enlightened despotism” can eventually produce a species of liberalism in Muslim nations, which in turns leads to democracy. In the end, “Shariah gets replaced by Swiss legal codes, and Muslims become like us.”

“But look at how history turned out,” Gerecht noted. “As soon as the Turkish military allowed a free vote, Islamist history came roaring back.” You can’t just pretend away centuries of Muslim history and create Switzerland in Anatolia.

His major point of departure from the Kirkpatrick-inspired worldview espoused by Stephens: He simply doesn’t think that all forms of Islamism can be dismissed as mere variants of totalitarianism. Gerecht believes there is indeed a real difference between the moderate variety that informs some elements of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the vicious and militant variety espoused by al-Qaeda. Indeed, he sees the former as something of a bulwark against the latter: For it provides an option for sensible and humane Muslims who happen to believe that religion has a role in law and public life, but who don’t necessarily want to go around blowing up infidels or putting their wives in Burkhas.

Gerecht believes our best option is to let history play itself out. Islamists will win elections, yes, but then they will have to deal with the thorny problem of governance. There is no shariah-ordained method of picking up trash, or setting corporate tax rates, or repairing oil pipelines. Either the Muslim Brotherhood will moderate its theocratic tendencies and embrace pragmatism, or it will become loathsome to the population — as is the case with Iran’s hated government — thereby sealing their political doom.

Whatever the pace of change, the role of religion in public life and the eventual transition to democracy will get hashed out. In this view, Islamism is a necessary phase that Muslim societies must go through, one that cannot be avoided by means of this or that Western foreign policy.

As for the notion that Islamism is akin to Nazism — an unshakably rigid and evil ideology — Gerecht doesn’t believe that.

In 1807, he noted, the British moved to shut down the slave trade, including its flourishing Ottoman component. At first, the Muslims were outraged — because they thought slavery was vouchsafed to them by God. And Muslim nations continued to trade slaves on a significant scale well into the 20th century. But today, few Muslims think Allah condones slavery. Muslim attitudes to important moral and political questions do change. It just takes time.

Who’s right? That depends on the fundamental question that splits Gerecht and Stpehens, alluded to above: Does Islamism have a genuine moderate variant that is not a mere smokescreen for something purely totalitarian? And I’m not sure anyone knows the answer to that yet.

But if Jeane Kirkpatrick were still around, I’d sure be interested in what she thought.

— Jonathan Kay is Managing Editor for Comment at the National Post, and a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on Twitter @jonkay.

Issues:

Egypt