Let me start with an interesting observation, and one that I saw with my own eyes while growing up in Morocco:
This article attempts to address one of the most fundamental issues of our time: how to eliminate the conditions for new jihadist groups to emerge?
This question has frustrated many US administrations, yet we don’t see it asked often. It’s certainly because it is a very complex problem. Since the end of WWII, we have seen mainly one approach taken by US administrations, with a second one emerging recently. Historically, US foreign policy in the Islamic world has always favored supporting authoritarian regimes, exactly because of what is said above, these regimes put in place a strong police system that brings stability to a weak state. The examples are numerous. We supported the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, King Hassan II, the Saud family, Hafez el Assad, and even his son, Bashar, the current ruler of Syria. The rationale calculation for this approach is that it yields stability in the country, where jihadist groups are eliminated by force. Unfortunately, because the state is usually weak, it ends up backfiring as societies, in this globalized age, start organizing and people aspire to a better life. Which leads us to the recent developments out of the Iraq war and the Arab Spring. Recently, US administrations have made an even bigger mistake, by pushing, sometimes forcing, democracy onto people in the middle east. A famous example is Bush’s failure in post-Saddam Iraq, or his insistence to hold elections in Gaza, which resulted in Hamas, a terrorist organization, legitimately taking over. A more recent example is the Arab Spring, where Obama and Hillary Clinton made exactly the same mistake, even though they strongly criticized the Bush administration Iraq’s democracy objectives. Obama threw Mubarak under the bus, which resulted in Mohamed Morsi, a leader from the terrorist group Muslim Brotherhood to become President of Egypt until July 2013, when General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a new strongman, removed him from office. More disturbing is Syria, where the Arab Spring, again backed by the Obama/Clinton administration, led to total chaos and civil war. At least in Egypt, there was an educated middle class that helped to avoid civil war, but in Syria, we are still dealing with the aftermath of Obama’s decision.
So what is the solution? It’s actually a simple one: have these countries adopt some variant of a capitalist liberal democracy. But as discussed above, what is complex is to get there. W. Bush thought that holding elections would be enough to get there, whereas Obama and Clinton believed that an organized civil society was enough. Both were terrible mistakes that will yield more jihadist groups terrorizing the region and the world for many years to come.
But is the Muslim world, especially the Arab one, ready for liberal democracy? The answer is no. Not because they are Arabs or Muslims, but because they haven’t gone through the stages that are required to get there. Francis Fukuyama, in his book “The Origins of Political Order”, argued that economic growth, social mobilization, and the three elements of political development—the state, rule of law, and accountability—are all independent aspects of national development, which work together in important ways to allow for a capitalist liberal democracy to finally emerge. Think about it, it took Europe close to 900 years to get there, and the US had the luxury to start from scratch with a group of dedicated people who understood what was missing in Britain to have a stable democracy. Also, not all countries have moved steadily toward liberal democracy. China and the United States currently represent two alternative and potentially attractive models of political organization:
- Effective Authoritarianism: China has an efficient and institutionalized authoritarian government with term limits and upward accountability. This permits rapid decision making and effective crisis response. Yet China is still vulnerable to the bad emperor problem: a poor leader can do much more damage in an authoritarian than a democratic system (Note: In March 2018, 3 months after I wrote this, Xi Jinping managed to change the constitution and remove the term limits instituted by Deng Xiaoping in 1981. Xi is now to rule China indefinitely. The bad Emperor has come back!)
- Checks and Balances: In the United States, the system is currently paralyzed by political polarization and unable to deal with long-term fiscal problems because of the influence of interest groups. Yet in the long term, this model is still more sustainable than the Chinese system, because it does not suffer from the bad emperor problem.
I believe that China, under the pressure of their enormously growing middle class, will move towards a democratic system with checks and balances, and this is probably the only path that the different countries in the Muslim world will have to follow. They need good emperors to emerge, à la Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, who are smart politically and economically, and who are not interested in bankrupting their countries like Assad, Saddam, Nasser and all the others did by (1) funneling all of their failures towards the west, the Jews and Israel and (2) getting their legitimacy from Islam by making pacts with unhinged religious mullahs. The slightly good news is that globalization can help them. Thanks to it, economic growth and social mobilization can now take place much more rapidly, and the spread of ideas has dramatically increased. These countries could learn from foreign models to implement a strong state. They would also have to ban Sharia law by implementing the rule of law, based on enlightened ideas and not worry about being removed from office thanks to the legitimacy granted to them by their accountability to their people. This is possible but, unfortunately, all very unlikely. And most importantly, it has to happen from within, not by foreign diktat.
