Tag: Islamism

He ain’t heavy, he’s my Muslim Brother

On By Martin Kramer

Martin Kramer delivered these remarks on September 24, on a panel entitled “Islam, Islamism, and U.S. Foreign Policy.” He shared the podium with the French Arabist Gilles Kepel, author of a new book, The War for Muslim Minds. The event took place at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

On September 11, the Washington Post published an article entitled “In Search of Friends Among the Foes.” The subject was the debate over whether the United States should begin a dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood and other so-called “moderate” Islamists. The very next day, the newspaper ran a lengthy opinion piece, arguing that the United States should do just that: “We need to listen to the bad guys too to understand where the fissures—and opportunities—might be.”

Reading the article, I had a pervasive sense of déjà vu. A similar debate took place in the early- and mid-1990s, among many of the same participants. The question of dialogue is a perennial one, arising whenever it looks like Islamists may be gaining ground. The debate a decade ago was prompted by the Islamist surge in Algeria and Egypt. That surge subsided, and so did the debate. The renewed debate is prompted by a forboding that Islamists may come out on top in Saudi Arabia or Iraq.

Today, there is an added incentive for pursuing such dialogue. Even if these so-called “moderate” Islamists are not about to take power, they might be useful as a counter to the jihadists. After all, for several decades, the United States looked to “moderate” Islamists to help counter the Soviet threat. Miles Copeland, CIA operative, wrote in his book The Game of Nations about how the United States, circa 1950s, tried to find an Iraqi “holy man” to carry the anti-Communist message. And there was the cooperation with Islamists that flourished after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. If the U.S. so effectively played this card against the Soviet Union, why not play it against Al Qaeda? There are rivalries there, so we are told; why not build on them? “You want in a Machiavellian way to have fundamentalists do [our] dirty work,” one veteran of the old battles tells the Washington Post.

Add to this the sense that the U.S. paid a price for not having some Islamic leverage on its side during the Iranian revolution. About 20 years ago, a State Department veteran, Ambassador Hermann Eilts, made the case for dialogue before Congress:

We must develop new modes of diplomacy, potentially involving Islamic leaders, for possible use in crises situations. During the Carter Administration, efforts were made by President Carter to persuade estimable Islamic leaders, respected by Khomeini, to intercede with the Ayatollah for the release of the hostages. It did not work because no Islamic leader could be found with the stature to confront Khomeini on an Islamic level or a willingness to stick his neck out for the U.S. But this type of contingency, that is, soliciting intercession on an Islamic level, should be kept in mind and planned for well in advance. Hence, the desirability of sustaining close and constant dialogue with senior Islamic figures everywhere.

Whenever I hear the word “dialogue,” I ask myself the question: dialogue about what? What does the United States have to say to the Muslim Brotherhood in a “close and constant dialogue”? What does it hope to learn?

There is a facile argument that it is good to hear their ideas first-hand. But there is nothing that cannot be learned about the Muslim Brotherhood’s positions from readily available sources. A good analyst, relying on the mass of openly available texts, will have no trouble eliciting the worldview of, say, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s actual paramount guide. Tell me you want to meet with an Islamist to tempt him with a cash-stuffed envelope, that is one thing. But meet him to sound him out? If you have done your homework, he will tell you nothing you do not know already.

Quid pro quo. The point of dialogue is give-and-take. It is here that the problem arises, and it is this: Islamists would give us very little, and take from us a great deal.

What would the so-called “moderate” Islamists demand from such a dialogue? Here is the laundry list:

  1. Visas for activists seeking refuge or asylum or the chance to proselytize in the United States.
  2. The freedom to raise money in the United States, ostensibly for widows and orphans, for school lunches and prayer rugs (i.e., access to cash-stuffed envelopes).
  3. U.S. agreement to urge or compel Arab-Muslim regimes like Egypt’s to open space for Islamist political activism which is now suppressed.
  4. A U.S. repeal of its Middle East policy, including its support for Israel.

And what do the “moderate” Islamists offer in return?

  1. Condemnations of the jihadists for actions like the September 11 attacks, the March 11 attacks in Madrid, and the slaughters in Bali and Beslan.
  2. The implicit promise that once the United States throws open its doors to Islamist activism, it will be accorded immunity from further attacks. (The implication is that, to improve one’s immune system, one should allow freedom of operation to an even wider range of Islamists.)

Any dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood or its appendages must inevitably develop along these lines. This is the core deal, the very substance of any “close and constant dialogue.” And there is ample precedent: there are several European governments that have engaged in such dialogue and cut this deal, either in whole or in part.

Let me explain why, to my mind and from the point of view of the United States, this is a raw deal.

If the United States has one achievement to show for the war on terror, it is this: there has not been a repeat of a 9/11-style attack on any scale, even in miniature, on U.S. soil. There are those who claim that U.S. policy has escalated the terror war, and that it has been unsuccessful. But this ignores the fact that the continental United States remains the prime terrorist target. This country’s enemies have been unable to strike it, partly because of the stringent measures of homeland security put in place after 9/11. Why would the United States endanger this indisputable achievement by opening itself up to Islamist penetration? Why would it run the risk of becoming another Londonistan? In return for what?

For we know from experience that Islamist “condemnations” of other Islamists tend to be hedged and conditional. And we know from experience that the money raised for the widows and orphans often gets diverted to assassins and bombers. And we especially know that Islamists use the freedoms of the West to attack precisely those in the East who are willing to work with us closely, whether they be regimes or liberals. This offends Muslim anti-Islamists mightily, and it makes us appear like wavering allies.

And even if, for the sake of argument, we wanted to play this tune in a minor key, there is no certainty that we would know who the “moderate” Islamists are. If there is anything more simplistic than lumping Islamists together, it has been the attempt to divide them into the neat classifications of “moderate” and “extremist.” Gilles Kepel in his book has a crucial passage on the branches of salafism, the pietistic and the jihadist. He comments on

how porous the two branches of salafism really are: to pass from one to the other is quite easy. The intense indoctrination preached by the sheikhists [e.g., the Saudi-style imams] reduces their flock’s capacity for personal reasoning, which makes these followers easy prey for a clever jihadist preacher. The first stage of brainwashing occurs at the hands of a pietistic salafist imam. Later they encounter a jihadist recruiting sergeant, who offers to quench their thirst for absolutes through a bracing activism.

Even if, as Kepel writes, such a migration to jihadism is not inevitable, we cannot know in advance or even in real-time when it is occurring. So why would we take a chance?

Engaging Islamists in a common cause against the Soviets was one thing: the Soviets were unbelievers. Even so, the anti-Soviet partnership was fraught with risks, culminating in the blowback of 9/11. Here we would be engaging Islamists in the hope that they would counter their own radical offspring. The risks here, in trying to turn Islamist against Islamist, would be greater by magnitudes.

Europe’s bind. So the advantages of dialogue are not at all clear, while the disadvantages are obvious. If one needs more evidence, one might look to Europe. Kepel’s last chapter is called “The Battle for Europe,” and he opens with these words: “With events in Madrid in spring 2004, Europe emerged as the primary battlefield on which the future of global Islam will be decided.” This is the same Europe that cut a deal with Islamists years ago, offering visas and asylum on the understanding that Europe was neutral ground. If it is now the “primary battlefield,” as Kepel describes it, it is because the United States has successfully pushed back the front line since 9/11, and because of decades of complacency of European elites.

What Europeans are discovering is that deals with Islamists, once cut, don’t always last. The U.S.-Islamist deal over Afghanistan did not last, and the European-Islamist deal is coming apart now. Europe’s unique dilemma is that Islamism is so thoroughly implanted in vast emigre communities (17 million), that it may be necessary for Europe to cut still another deal, even less favorable than the previous one. Kepel has an interesting section on how some Muslims have come to consider Europe part of dar al-Islam, the abode of Islam. The trade-off these Islamists now offer is a forgoing of violence in return for implementation of Islamic law for Muslims on European soil—nothing less. And when Europe balks at this, as France did when it banned headcarves from schools, it finds itself held hostage.

In fact, dialogue with Islamists has never provided the iron-clad immunity Europeans thought it would. For example, it was from a Paris suburb that Khomeini conducted his campaign against the Shah. When he returned to Iran, an Air France jet carried him home. The French, by their hospitality and solicitude, were quite certain they would enjoy an inside track with the revolutionary regime.

Did they? Over the next few years, their troops were blown up in Beirut by Iran’s clients, their nationals were abducted in Lebanon at Iran’s behest, and Iranian assassins wantonly killed dissidents on their territory. Agents of Iran even subjected Paris to a bombing campaign, which prompted the so-called war of the embassies, during which both countries laid siege to one another’s embassies. In short, the French got the same treatment as the Americans, if not worse, despite a policy that had effectively coddled Iran’s Islamists on their march to power. This has been replicated today: despite France’s opposition to U.S. policy in Iraq, Iraqi Muslim extremists have seized French hostages, and have resisted all appeals for their release.

The wrong Muslims. If some of the Islamists today were on a march to power, the case for dialogue might be more compelling. But where are these Islamists? Where is the Khomeini of Saudi Arabia or Iraq? Skeptical as we may be about the prospects for the Saudi monarchy or the Iraqi government, it is difficult to see Islamists who could replace them. And what would we talk about in a dialogue with the kinds of Islamists who seek to seize power in Saudi Arabia or Iraq? Would not such a dialogue merely antagonize and alienate those forces for stability that still have a chance to see the crisis through? And do we really think that were we to facilitate the ascent of any of these groups, they would be grateful for it? Any more so than the Afghan mujahideen?

In sum, dialogue with “moderate” Islamists, far from undercutting the jihadists, would undercut their opponents. It would muddle the message of the war on terror—the message that there can be no middle ground, and that Muslims must choose. Islamists not only wish to create a middle ground in the Middle East, but they seek to extend it to American soil. Few things could undermine the war on terror more thoroughly than dialogue with them, because it would facilitate just that.

The United States has no use for equivocating Islamists. The United States does have use for dialogue with believing Muslims—those who share its vision of a Middle East that is free, and free of terror.

Inclusion or Exclusion? Islamism in Politics

On By Martin Kramer

Martin Kramer, “Inclusion or Exclusion? Islamism in Politics,” in An Agenda for Action: The 2002 Doha Conference on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World (Washington: The Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, 2003), pp. 41-44. The remarks were originally delivered on October 20, 2002. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

In the title of this panel, we have been given these two alternatives of inclusion and exclusion for the Islamist movements.

The choice of words already tends to prejudge the issue: How can one possibly oppose inclusion? Isn’t the essence of democracy and equality summarized by the word “inclusion”? Isn’t exclusion something fundamentally undemocratic and discriminatory? How is it possible to advocate the exclusion of anyone from politics? After all, the inclusion of everyone, men and women, black and white, rich and poor, is considered the fundamental condition of democracy and, one could argue, also of modernity.

Needless to say, I’m sympathetic to the arguments in favor of inclusion. In the Middle East I think many of us would agree that the authoritarian state has failed to fulfill its self-appointed role of bringing modernity to the masses and to the state. This state will always be limited in the public goods it can deliver. So eventually the state will have to find a way to accommodate the growing desire for wider participation.

But let me also state my own unequivocal view: The inclusion of Islamists has not represented a progressive step forward where it has been taken, and in some cases it may actually constitute a dangerous step backward. It would be a mistake for the United States to press for the inclusion of Islamists even if democracy promotion becomes a feature of its Middle East policy.

Similarly, I think it would be a mistake to rush to the defense of Islamists whose conduct has brought the wrath of the state down upon their heads. Where Islamists have been tainted by terrorism, the United States should not be bound by the fact that these same Islamists may sit in parliaments.

Anyone familiar with U.S. policy already knows that it does not include support for the inclusion of Islamists. I’m not stating anything but the obvious. Yet no one who speaks for U.S. policy has been prepared to rationalize it. So allow me to rationalize it. I’m not an official or prospective official; I speak only for myself. But since 9/11 the views that I hold are held much more widely than they were before. It’s an approach to Islamism that I should stress has nothing to do with Islam per se and everything to do with the actual conduct of the Islamist movements themselves.

Let me not put too fine a point on it. To date almost every political order that has included Islamists and given them a space in which to operate has become a trouble spot or a breeding ground for terrorism. Some say,“include the Islamists,” include them in the game and they will moderate. The actual evidence to date is that the more space Islamists are given, the more threatening they become in the first instance to their fellow Muslims, including many secularists, but also to the United States.

Now, let me illustrate the point by a number of examples. In an earlier session someone mentioned Lebanon as being very exceptional in the Arab world. I too think it is unique in the Arab world. It actually has a measure of political pluralism, it has political parties, a relatively open press, and elections. Lebanon’s predisposition is to include everyone, and the Islamists of Hezbollah have been included in the system for a decade now. Hezbollah is formally recognized, its representatives sit in the parliament, and it has a standing invitation to join the cabinet of the Lebanese government.

Yet this has not deterred the Islamists. To the contrary, they have established a virtual state within the state. Hezbollah remains armed. It has taken over some of the most sensitive parts of the country. And it operates with minimal regard for the Lebanese state. It periodically nudges both Lebanon and the region to the brink of war.

Now, I know that some of you will say, “But they’re a resistance movement,” to which I would answer, perhaps they were a resistance movement but now they are a power unto themselves much like the PLO was in the 1970s, or, one could argue, even more than the PLO because Hezbollah actually has strategic capabilities. I think this bodes ill for the future prospects of Lebanon as a state.

And what of the Palestinian Authority? Even under the less than ideal rule of Yasser Arafat, it has been less oppressive than any other Arab state. It tolerates a wider range of political expression than Syria, Jordan, or Egypt. And, of course, it tolerates the Islamists as well. The result here again is the Islamists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad have gained an influence which is far in excess of their numbers. If Hamas is not formally part of the Palestinian government it’s only because Hamas chooses to remain outside, but they are entirely free to organize, preach, and demonstrate.

How have they used that freedom? They are armed to the teeth, they have grown terrorist appendages, which answer only to themselves and whose violence has infected the entire Palestinian body politic. But beyond issues related to their stance towards Israel, they have become an authority within the authority and they are a law unto themselves.

Now, you might say the two instances I just gave are exacerbated by the Arab-Israeli conflict and so they aren’t genuine tests. So let’s look beyond the Arab- Israeli arena. Is the situation any different in the Arabian Peninsula, for example? It would be presumptuous of me to speak about Yemen, given the fact that my colleague on this panel will do so, so I won’t. I would simply ask this: Did the opening of Yemeni politics a decade ago not create the space in which extreme Islamism now flourishes today? Is it a coincidence that in the 1990s Yemen pioneered the inclusion of Islamists and that today Yemen is regarded as a breeding ground for extreme Islamist terror?

Last night, one of our Kuwaiti participants drew a line between Kuwait’s relative political openness and the spread to that country of al-Qaeda, and I take that as a suggestion that perhaps Kuwait drew the line in the wrong place when it drew it to include the Islamists.

And how can we forget the political order that is the most inclusive of Islamists? I’m speaking of Saudi Arabia, which is a regime built upon an institutionalized inclusion of Islamists in the political order. No, there are no elections in Saudi Arabia, but the Islamist element, which is to say much of the Saudi religious establishment, has an allotted share of power. For a long time it was believed that the Saudi royal house had found the perfect formula for neutralizing the religious zealotry that created the Saudi state: bring the zealots into the tent, make them complicit in the modernizing project of the Al Saud, tempt them, co-opt them, and harvest those fatwas of compliance with the ruling order.

I think we all know what has become of this experiment now that we’ve taken a closer look at it since 9/11. It’s not certain who has co-opted whom. The Islamists who are within the system have subverted it, using the immunities they enjoy to spread extremism and its terrorist offshoots across the world. The Saudi symbiosis has become an extremism machine. “Our Islamists,” the ones who were supposed to be safely under control, have been running amok.

So in short, political inclusion has not been an antidote to extremism. Quite the opposite: The more inclusive the system, the more likely it is to become the host of some cancerous Islamist movement, which combines both incitement and terrorism.

What about the moderate Islamist? Surely you realize that all Islamists are not alike, you will say. I do realize it. Obviously there must be differences among Islamists. A well-known American scholar has made a career of repeatedly urging that the U.S. government “distinguish between Islamic movements that are a threat and those that represent legitimate indigenous attempts to reform and redirect their societies.”

This seems an eminently reasonable objective on paper, but in practice it means going out and measuring each movement and classifying it. Let’s admit the truth: The record of Arab and Western governments in classifying Islamist moderates has been a very patchy one indeed. Time and again Islamists who are regarded as moderates have turned out to be anything but that. That is because the idea of Islamism as a spectrum from extremism through moderation is a misleading analogy. Islamism is not a spectrum; it is more like an orbit. At times Islamists appear to be approaching us. At other times they appear to be moving away from us. But the thing to remember is that they are always in motion and that they will not defy the gravity of their idea. In particular, they can’t be expected to exit the orbit of the ideal Islamic state and slip into the orbit of liberal democracy. This is as likely as the conversion of these Islamists to another religion.

There are governments in the region that may decide to include Islamists. They may feel that the risks of exclusion are greater than the risks of inclusion. This might be particularly true in the monarchies, where there are certain agreed limits to the process of political change. In these settings a ruler may feel that Islamists can be compelled to play strictly according to the rules of the ruler. It’s hard for me to second-guess these decisions, even though many of them have gone wrong in the past.

The problem is that when the inclusiveness bargain goes wrong, when Islamists begin to violate the rules of their contract, they often begin by assailing the contract of these rulers with the United States. In fact, it’s now happening across the region. The stability of the region, and with it the discourse of live and let live, are not being undermined by Islamists who have been excluded in places like Syria, Iraq, Libya or Tunisia; they are being undermined by the most included of the Islamists. Where these Islamists have acquired certain immunities, they are wary about criticizing their rulers head-on. So the discourse of dissent has taken the form of a particularly virulent anti-Americanism, and its main theme has been that the United States is waging a war on Islam itself. Those who make this claim are in a cynical way seeking to continue the work begun on 9/11.

There is little that the United States can do to dissuade governments from giving these Islamists space or a platform. But it should be understood that the U.S. isn’t obligated by such decisions, and when the U.S. succeeds in linking these Islamists with terrorism and the support for terrorism, it is perfectly within its rights to insist that governments choose.

The United States is not at war with Islam or even with Islamism, but it can no longer be complacent about Islamists who have abused their inclusion to engage in or support a clandestine war against the United States. Inclusion cannot be bought at the price of America’s own interests and the lives of its own citizens at home and abroad.

Sometimes I hear the United States discussed in the Middle East as though it were some abstract principle, a set of philosophical assumptions that should be entirely consistent and free of all contradictions. The United States has pretensions to change the world. But it’s also a country like any other in that it has a number of people, some 280 million Americans of all faiths, creeds and races, whose security and well-being are the very first priority of the United States government. On their behalf the United States must sometimes follow policies abroad that contradict some generally enunciated principle by which Americans govern themselves, and frankly I see no fault in that.

The late Elie Kedourie used to say that hypocrisy cannot characterize a government. It can characterize an individual but not a government. A government must protect its people and their interests. The policies it pursues to achieve this may complement one another on a practical level even though they contradict one another on a philosophical level. In an individual it is a virtue to live consistently by principle; in a government it’s a dangerous indulgence. The most harmful regimes in the 20th century ignored the interests of their own peoples, instead pursuing some self-appointed mission in the world.

So in conclusion I say this: By all means let the United States promote the idea of inclusion. That is the half of policy that is idealistic and, if you will, missionary. And let it at the same time accept the exclusion of the Islamists. That is the half of policy that is practical and legitimately self-interested. To promote any other policy would be an irresponsible gamble unbecoming of the world’s only superpower.

Arabic translation of this presentation: Download

Should America Promote a Liberal, Democratic Middle East?

On By Martin Kramer

Martin Kramer, “Can America Promote a Liberal, Democratic Middle East?,” in Bush Administration Middle East Policy: A Mid-Term Assessment, 2002 Weinberg Founders Conference, October 4-6, 2002 (Washington, D.C.: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2003), pp. 72-75. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

Can there be a liberal, democratic Middle East? This is very much a loaded question. It reminds me a bit of the famous exchange between a journalist and Mahatma Gandhi. The journalist asked Gandhi: what do you think of Western civilization? To which he replied: I think it would be a good idea. Gandhi’s point was that the modern West had failed to live up to the promise of the rich legacy of its civilization.

If I were asked today what I think of modern Arab civilization, I would probably answer the same: it would be a good idea. Here, too, there is a great legacy that the contemporary Arab world has been unable to renew. And nowhere has that been more apparent than in the failure of the Arab world to create the climate of free inquiry without which modern civilization is impossible. In our times, it is difficult to create such a climate without democracy.

If the 20th century has left us with a lesson, it is that the civilizations that will flourish in the 21st will rest on democracy. Every form of dictatorship, from communism to fascism, was discredited in the 20th century. We are approaching the point in human history where democracy will be deemed a prerequisite of modern civilization itself, and its absence, the most obvious symptom of modern barbarism. If that becomes so, then there is little doubt which side of the divide the Arab world will occupy. Freedom House ranks it as the least free part of the globe. And certainly there is a high correlation between the prevalence of despotism and a whole range of barbaric outrages, from the gassing of Kurds to 9/11. We know from experience that despotism generates terror. And has there ever been a form of despotism in modern times that did not encourage and even nurture anti-Semitism?

Since 9/11, many commentators have looked at the Arab world, made similar observations, and then drawn a conclusion. The conclusion is this: the United States should use its vast power to promote democracy in the Middle East. Not only should it plan to replace hostile despotisms, like Iraq’s, with democratic regimes. It should compel our allies, such as the Egyptians and the Saudis, to open up their politics. The theory is that if these were more open systems, this would drain away the intolerance and hatred that pervade these societies, including the hatred of America and the desire to eradicate Israel.

The argument for such a policy draws on two reservoirs: one, the can-do missionary optimism that has always colored the American approach to the Middle East; and two, the success of the United States in turning other parts of the world toward democracy.

Let me say that I am sympathetic to the intentions behind the promotion of democracy in the Middle East. I am also profoundly skeptical about what its consequences might be. Sympathetic, because I too believe that a truly democratic Arab world would more easily align itself with the champion of democracy, the United States. A truly democratic Arab world might even find it easier to accept Israel, another democracy, in its midst. But skeptical because I believe the underpinnings of such a transformation are completely lacking in the Arab world. Any attempt to promote democracy, far from making things better, might make them worse.

For you see, ladies and gentlemen, I do not believe that the only alternative to the existing authoritarian order is democracy. Certainly it is the desirable alternative. But if we set ourselves the mission of democratizing the Arab world—especially if we decide to begin with our putative friends—there is more than a risk of unintended consequences. There would almost certainly be unintended consequences. This is what happened in the Balkans, in the aftermath of the collapse of communism. This is what has happened in parts of Central Asia in the aftermath of communism. We owe it to ourselves, if not to the Arab world, to be frank with them and with ourselves: the Arab world doesn’t yet have the basic building blocks of democracy.

The most basic building blocks are not elections, or political parties, or a free press. You can have elections in countries that are not free—the Arab world has them all the time. These countries have voting; they just don’t have counting. Or let’s just say they have selective counting, which produces those famous 99-percent votes in favor of the ruler. As for political parties, the Arab world also has them—mostly in the form of ruling parties. There are lots of those. And thanks to the proliferation of technologies, the press has never been freer in the Arab world—freer to disseminate hatred, lies, and incitement. These are not the building blocks of democracy.

The basic building blocks are attitudes—above all, a tolerance of political differences, indeed even a celebration of political differences, debated openly and decided freely.

Arab society lacks that tolerance. It is very sharing of many things—but not of political power. That power is like the honor of one’s women: it cannot be compromised without being lost. And in the Arab world, historically, the loss of power has meant the loss of everything: honor, possessions. home, life itself. I do not claim here that the Arab world is imprisoned by Islam, as some might argue. I do claim that it is burdened by its history—history transmuted into memory, and preserved as a mindset. And I would summarize the mindset in a simple axiom: rule or die.

Hence, the dearth of what is called civil society. Civil society is that panoply of associations that are greater than individual, family, clan, and tribe. These associations organize people around shared ideas and interests; democratic societies are replete with thousands upon thousands of such associations, from the PTA to the Pac.

In the Arab world, civil society is very thin on the ground. And the reason is this: civil society is regarded everywhere as a form of political opposition. The state therefore seeks to destroy or co-opt it. And the people? They also suspect the institutions of civil society, which cannot protect them from the state, and whose sponsors are often distrusted. The only exception is the mosque, and through the mosque, the Islamic movements, to which I’ll return momentarily.

Now an American policy devoted to promoting democracy could strip the existing order of some of its legitimacy. In places where that legitimacy is particularly thin, such a policy could even precipitate regime change. I give America that much credit. But the question is, what comes next?

And here we come back to the law of unintended consequences: if something can go wrong, it will. As the United States and Israel have just pursued a utopian peace process to its unintended consequence, it seems to me very appropriate to ask this: does anyone think that our tools of social engineering are any more precise when it comes to the democracy process? Are we so certain of the outcome that we can confidently take a jackhammer not only to the political structures of our enemies, but of our allies as well?

To the promoters of democracy, I say, promise one thing: that the existing order will not be replaced by civil war as in Bosnia or Algeria or Lebanon. For bad as the Arab world is, it could get worse, and in fact it has been worse at various times and places. Almost everywhere, beneath the coercive order enforced by the regimes, there are precisely the same ethnic tensions that produced war in Bosnia, the same inter-faith hatreds that gave us war in Lebanon, or the same struggle for Islam that ended in civil war in Algeria. Can the doctors of democracy promise, first of all, to do no harm?

Some of them offer democracy as an antidote to the Islamic movements I alluded to a moment ago. These movements are the opportunistic infections that have followed the failed social experiments of the Arab world. They are the poor man’s civil society, and a poor substitute for it, since these movements are tolerance-deficient in the extreme.

How can they be defeated? Some analysts suggest the answer to political Islam is democracy. Get the Islamists into the system, open the game to their participation, and they will lose their appeal.

I can assure you that from the vantage point of Israel, things look precisely the opposite. Israel has five immediate neighbors: Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority. Syria, Jordan, and Egypt are ruled without even a pretense of democracy. Syria is ruled by a hereditary dictator, Jordan is ruled by an absolute monarch, and Egypt is ruled by a president-for-life. And witness: Islamist movements are no great threat to order in any of these three autocratic states.

But look at Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority. Lebanon actual has a measure of political pluralism, it has political parties, a relatively open press, elections. Yet this has not diminished the influence of Islamists. To the contrary, they flourish there in their most extreme form: the Shiite Hizbullah. This movement remains armed, it has taken over the most sensitive part of the country, and it operates as a state within a state, periodically nudging the entire region to the brink of war.

And what of the Palestinian Authority? Even under Arafat’s wretched and corrupt rule, it still was less oppressive than any other Arab state. It tolerated a wider range of political expression than Syria, Jordan, or Egypt—and of course it tolerated Islamists. And the result? Here again, the Islamists of Hamas and Jihad have gained an influence far in excess of their numbers, and they have grown murderous terrorist appendages, whose suicidal violence has infected the entire Palestinian body politic.

In short, political pluralism has not been an antidote to political Islam. Quite the opposite: the more pluralistic the system, the more likely it is to become the host of some cancerous Islamist movement combining incitement and terrorism. One can hardly blame Israelis if they express a strong preference for living alongside a dictator, a monarch, or a president-for-life. To live alongside a freer Arab society has so far meant to live alongside suicide bombers, flying rockets, and bottomless incitement.

I conclude. If there is one thing worse than an authoritarian state, it is a failed state. A pro-democracy policy could create them.

It could do so precisely in places ruled by your allies. It has happened before: the Carter administration’s promotion of human rights contributed to Khomeini’s revolution in Iran. You cannot impose political openings on all of your adversaries—the Asads and the Qadhafis and the Saddams. Are you prepared to try to impose them only on your allies? If you do, and it backfires (like the peace process did), this well-intentioned policy could leave us with a Middle East divided between radical nationalist dictators who you have failed to displace, and populist Islamist revolutions you will have failed to deflect. Our annual conference will have to run an entire week to cover all the threats.

Arab democracy? A good idea—provided the Arabs come up with it themselves. America’s role should be that of a shining model, the city on a hill. Make this democracy the best it can be, keep this society the freest on earth. And be patient. The rest will surely follow.