The Foreign Service Journal, February 2007

beginning with the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rums- feld, but this will affect only tactics, not the strategy of promoting democ- ratization in the Middle East — much less the goal of stamping out terrorism or at least diminishing it radically. Before going further in assessing where Bush’s policies stand now and where they are likely to go — or where I would like them to go — let me reveal my biases. I am an original neoconservative, a member of that small band of liberal intellectuals who migrated rightward in the early 1970s because of our dis- tress that most of our fellow liberals were losing their ardor for anti-communism. I did not vote for Bush in 2000 because I took him to have little interest in foreign policy, which is of paramount importance to me. But I came to be a strong supporter because of his response to 9/11, which was both necessary and brave, and I remain one even though he has made errors. Bush has gotten himself and our nation into trouble in Iraq. For that, he and those of us who extolled his actions deserve to take our lumps. Perhaps if we had sent many more troops at the outset and done other things differ- ently, the mission would have been crowned with success. Or perhaps conquering and remaking Iraq was inherent- ly a flawed idea. But even if the latter is true, that does not prove that Bush’s overall strategy of promoting democracy or his decision to treat terrorism as a matter of war rather than law enforcement were wrong. Responding to 9/11 What was new about 9/11 was not the nature of the act but its magnitude. Middle Eastern terrorists had been murdering Americans for three decades, by the ones, tens and hundreds. Now they had killed nearly three thousand of us in a swoop, and would surely try to top that if we let them. The harm and the threat of further harm could be tolerated no longer. Indictments, subpoenas and extradi- tion requests were of little avail. Only a warlike response would do. Yet military acts, while necessary, were not sufficient. The underlying problem was that so many young Middle Easterners were prepared to throw away their lives for the simple joy of killing Americans and to believe they were thereby doing something noble. We could capture or kill many of them, but the supply seemed inexhaustible. Hence the need not only to fight terrorism but to address its “root causes.” But what were they? Some say that the key was poverty. But this is empirically false: studies have shown that terrorists tend to be above aver- age in socioeconomic status. The 19 killers who carried out the 9/11 attacks all fit that pattern, while their leader, Osama bin Laden, is a pampered mul- timillionaire. It was also an analysis that led nowhere, for all the governments in the world already aimed to foster economic growth: there was nothing that the threat of ter- rorism could teach them to do differently in their eco- nomic policies. Push Democratization The alternative explanation that Bush embraced traces terrorism to the political culture of the Middle East. It was a region where not a single government, outside of Israel, rested on the consent of the governed, where vio- lence, or the threat of it, remained the principal currency of politics. Borrowing from the well-verified theory that democracy discourages war, Bush’s idea postulated that it would likewise discourage terrorism. Although this infer- ence had not been empirically demonstrated, it was entirely reasonable. If people internalized the habits of democracy — resolving political issues by debating and voting — then terrorism would come to seem as absurd and abhorrent to them as it does to us. For all the lack of success that Bush has had in Iraq, his efforts to catalyze a democratic transformation in the Middle East have borne fruit — or at least the first buds. In its annual survey of freedom published in 2006, Freedom House reported that the most notable advances of freedom over the previous year had been registered in the Muslim world in general, and the Middle East in par- ticular. This broke a 30-year pattern in which that region (and that religion) had been stagnant in terms of freedom while the rest of the world advanced. The fact that Islamist groups have exploited the oppor- tunities that freer elections have given them, and that F O C U S 36 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 7 Our efforts to catalyze a democratic transformation in the Middle East have borne fruit — or at least the first buds. Continued from page 29