For the past year a four-letter word has emerged as the key to the future of the Middle East. This word--Iraq--is being presented in some Western media outlets as a code word for chaos and "another Vietnam", but it has a different resonance in the region itself.
To Arab and Iranian despots, Iraq is a code word for reforms that could end their monopoly on power. To radical Islamists fighting for power in a dozen Muslim countries, Iraq is seen as the "the final battleground" between Islam and democracy. And to the people of the region, Iraq is a code word for change.
The conventional wisdom in the West is that democratization in Iraq is a forlorn outcome. Self-styled experts in London and Washington are urging Tony Blair and George W. Bush to settle for a "possible", as opposed to an "ideal", Iraq. Translated into practical terms it means the instauration of a "lite" version of a despotic Arab regime in Baghdad followed by a quiet retreat by the U.S.-led coalition. Call it a policy of "cut and stroll away while whistling", if you like.
The arguments why Iraq could not, indeed should not, become a democracy are well known: Arabs have no experience with democracy; Iraqis are too divided by ethnic and religious differences to think of the common good; there is no popular base for democratic politics in the newly liberated country.
While these claims are easily refutable, I fear that those who advance them are unlikely to allow their minds to be changed. The Iraq debate is becoming a bit like trench warfare on the Western Front in the stalemate years of World War I.
