Warped advice blights American intervention
By Anatol Lieven
FT
March 16 2005 20:11
In Armenia in the late 1990s, I visited a very brave former Soviet
Armenian dissident. He had spent years in Soviet prison and his walls
were festooned with awards from western organisations devoted to
supporting democracy and human rights. Indeed, I have no reason to
doubt the sincerity of his commitment to Armenian democracy. But what
I mainly remember is his territorial vision. He believed that Armenia
should seek the annexation of the whole of eastern Turkey on the basis
of ancient historical and ethnic ties.
As many examples have made clear since the Soviet Union’s collapse,
the Soviet dissident movement had two starkly different faces, often
combined in the same person. Both were about freedom but very
different kinds of freedom. The first was about freedom for the
individual; the second, freedom for a particular nation.
Natan Sharansky, the Israeli government minister, has gained
considerable influence over George W. Bush thanks to his heroic past
as a Soviet dissident.
Mr Sharansky’s book The Case for Democracy is one of the few works on
the Middle East that Mr Bush has read. According to Mr Bush himself,
Mr Sharansky has been a key inspiration for the US president’s
rhetoric of spreading democracy and freedom.
Tragically, however, Mr Sharansky’s record in Israel, and Mr Bush’s
apparent indifference to this record, demonstrate the almost Orwellian
contradictions in the US approach to the Muslim world. They also go to
the heart of European doubts about both the practicality and sincerity
of US progressive agendas in the Middle East. The grounds for such
doubts are especially worth recalling at present, given the short-term
exuberance produced by developments such as the Iraqi elections and
anti-Syrian demonstrations in Lebanon. Mr Bush was first attracted to
Mr Sharansky by his noble record of resistance to Soviet tyranny,
which earned him years in Soviet jails. Today, however, Mr Sharansky
is a leader of the Soviet immigrant-based Yisrael Ba’aliyah party,
which takes a hard line on Palestinian demands and security issues,
and has supported the expansion of settlements.
In his book, Mr Sharansky writes that peace depends on the spread of
democracy and this should be driven by a coalition of all “free
nations” of the world. In his words: “The free world should not wait
for dictatorial regimes to consent to reform. We must be prepared to
move forward over their objections . . . we can live in a world where
no regime that attempts to crush dissent will be tolerated.”
Mr Sharansky’s demand for greater democracy is, of course, focused
foremost on the Palestinians. He said in February that he would be
prepared to give the Palestinians “all the rights in the world” once
they fully adopted democracy. The problem is that Mr Sharansky has
never said what land he would be willing to concede, even to a fully
democratic Palestinian state. His record in office, however, has
reflected utter contempt for the lives, property and well-being of
Palestinians, as well as for their opinions, whether democratically
expressed or not.
As Israel’s minister of Jerusalem affairs, Mr Sharansky decided last
June to interpret a 1950 law in such a way as to allow the Israeli
government without legal process to confiscate Palestinian land around
Jerusalem – a decision that has now been struck down by Israel’s
attorney general on the grounds that it is legally indefensible,
contrary to “the rules of customary international law” and bound to
encourage violence.
In writing of the need to bring democracy to the Arab world, Mr
Sharansky makes repeated parallels with America’s propagation of its
democratic message to the subject peoples of the Soviet Union and
eastern Europe. But the peoples of eastern Europe, the Baltic states
and the Caucasus had good reason to identify America and democracy not
only with personal freedom but with national liberation from Soviet
domination. Ask many ordinary Arabs which superpower today is playing
a role in the Middle East analogous to that of the Soviet Union in
eastern Europe and what answer would you get?
The parallel with eastern Europe therefore, far from being
encouraging, actually suggests the greatest problem faced by
proponents of westernising reform in the Middle East today: namely,
the immense difficulty they have in mobilising nationalism in support
of their programme.
Of course, were it possible for the US to act in the Muslim world as
it has done in eastern Europe, and to spread freedom and development,
this would indeed be a wonderful boon for the region and the
world. But none of this can possibly happen as long as the US is
identified both by Muslims and by Europeans with agendas such as Mr
Sharansky’s. If Mr Bush really wants to play a progressive role in the
region, he badly needs other sources of advice and inspiration.
* Natan Sharansky (with Ron Dermer), The Case for Democracy: The Power
of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror (Public Affairs)
The writer is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace in Washington DC; his latest book is America Right
or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (OUP/HarperCollins)
