Waking from the Democratic Dream

The time has come for the United States to give up on the notion of democracy in the Middle East. It isn’t going to happen, at least not anytime soon, and the country is starting to look silly with so many of its intellectuals clinging to a notion that has no basis in reality. Just look at Iraq, set upon a course that many Americans thought would lead to democracy, and paid for with the blood of more than four thousand American dead and some thirty-three thousand wounded. What do we see in today’s Iraq? A budding dictatorship moving in the direction of the last one—but with a big difference: this one is dominated by Shiites, a power arrangement that appreciably enhances the regional influence of neighboring Iran, considered by many Americans as their country’s most nettlesome adversary.

Look at Egypt, where the “Arab Spring” set American hearts aflutter with the prospect of democratic pluralism. The lesson there is that it’s impossible to overestimate the willingness of the traditional power blocs to upend any democratic structures or procedures that threaten their position and prerogatives in that venerable land. Consider tiny Kuwait, where the highest court just annulled the duly run parliamentary elections of February, in which opposition forces made serious gains against the country’s status quo forces. And look at Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, where any democratic sentiments are quickly quashed whenever they gain any apparent traction at all.

And yet in the face of all this, and more, many idealistic Americans hold fast to the idea that if we can just provide assistance and guidance and apply sufficient military power against the bad guys, democratic institutions eventually will blossom in the region. The problem here isn’t just that this notion lacks any shred of realism; more significantly, it undergirds the constant call for America to apply military force in the region on behalf of democracy . . . or the prospect of democracy . . . or at least the prospect that some Middle Eastern nation might begin a long journey toward democracy. Consider, for example, Libya, where the demise of the dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi led many Americans to visualize the stirrings of a democratic impulse, made possible in large measure by America’s judicious application of force.

But then it turned out that the militias that emerged during the anti-Qaddafi fervor weren’t about to relinquish their weapons or their territorial gains and that the country couldn’t rise above the chaos of tribal, ethnic and sectarian strife. It isn’t clear that Libya is really a nation at present. True, we don’t often hear today the kind of rhetoric that President George W. Bush unfurled during his second inaugural address in January 2005, when he proclaimed America’s “ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” That now is seen as idle talk without any foundation in serious thought. But that perception doesn’t stop many from still seeing America’s goal as the spread of democracy—and democracy’s goal as eradicating tyranny.

The essential problem with all this is that it is grounded in ignorance. Americans can’t fathom the power of the Islamic idea that there is no spiritual “I,” but only a spiritual “We” that has entered into the quickened body as a reflection of the divine light. The Arabic word for this, as Oswald Spengler points out, is Islam—submission. He adds that the Western religious sacrament of contrition “presupposes the strong and free will that can overcome itself. But it is precisely the impossibility of an Ego as a free power in the face of the divine that constitutes ‘Islam.’” He explains that the Islamic prime sacrament is Grace, which knows no such thing as free will.

As Islam emerged in the seventh century, the consensus of the community became by definition infallible. As Muhammad put it, “My people can never agree in an error.” This concept of an infallible community consensus lies at the heart of two fundamental Islamic religious ideas—first, that the individual is meaningless outside this infallible consensus and, second, that government and religion remain inseparable. Those ideas were incorporated into Islam in the seventh century and remain to this day bedrock maxims of Islamic thought—and powerful doctrinal impediments to the democratic impulse.

Americans know that a central tenet of Islam is an absolute conviction that government and religion are intertwined as one. But they can’t bring themselves to see that this perception is fundamental and embedded in the culture of the region. Nor can they see that this reality will always militate against the democratic impulses that inevitably spring up from time to time within the hopes and dreams of many people of the region.

Further, many Americans can’t see that many secular mores and folkways of the region are the product of the bedouin culture, developed over centuries of isolation in an austere and unforgiving land. As David Pryce-Jones writes in his book The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs, Middle Eastern nationalism “simply adds what might be called an outer ring” to the tribal customs and judgments of Middle Eastern society.