Democracy in Decline

The ritual of elections may have thrown many countries into convulsions in recent months but it has yielded little in the way democratic change. Elections in Iran confirmed the status quo. In Kenya they led to tribal conflict that claimed 1,000 lives. In newly-affluent Russia voters were not unhappy with President Putin's creative reinvention of his regime, while in Pakistan, Spain, Malaysia and Malta they ushered in some changes but few surprises. In France municipal elections provided an early measure of President Sarkozy's popularity.

In the Arab region atrophied autocracies dominated by octogenarian rulers continued to propagate the rhetoric of reform while resisting change. In the United States primaries are running along skin-deep racial and gender lines, camouflaged as core issues. Democracy, in the sense of renewal by political rotation, is making a poor showing around the world.

That self-proclaimed mother of democracy, the US, has had a miscarriage in Iraq. Its doctrine of regime change by military invasion, five years old and counting, has had adverse effects. An estimated 1.2 million Iraqis have died and 4.7 million have been displaced. There have been 4,000 US military casualties in a military misadventure that Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz estimates has cost up to $2 trillion.

One enduring legacy of this military disaster is that it has ensured the survival of entrenched autocratic Arab regimes which have concluded that the US is little more than a paper tiger. Intimidated into alliance with Washington for reasons of self-preservation, these regimes have borrowed America's fight against terrorism slogan as a way to stifle domestic dissent, arrest the dynamics of change, hamper the progress of basic freedoms and human rights and rig elections to ensure they remain in power.

The US invasion of Iraq has stymied the slow but inevitable transformation to democracy in the Arab region, setting it back by at least a decade. On the other side of the coin, the free and fair election of Hamas as a legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories was strangled by the paragons of Western democracy. The US project of a new, reformed and democratic Middle East pliant to US interests and Israeli hegemony, and of which a liberated Iraq was the supposed flagship, has failed.

The botched Anglo-American invasion of Iraq has in addition unleashed radical legions in the wider Middle East that will continue to battle the forces of invasion for decades, confronting local regimes seen to have collaborated with Washington ever more aggressively. America's brief reprieve from insurgency attacks in Iraq is coming to an end. US casualties are rising again despite General David Petraeus's "surge" that poured 30,000 more troops into the country. The general's plan, which bought scaled-down attacks in Baghdad, clenched a six-month-long ceasefire with the Mahdi army of Shia cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr and created and enlisted the Sunni militias of the Awakening Councils in the fight to flush out Al-Qaeda, is now unravelling. Al-Qaeda has resumed attacks in the Diala province and in Basra, some factions of the Mahdi Army have relinquished their commitment to the ceasefire and the Awakening Councils are coming under heavy militia attack. Last week 10 US military personnel were killed in a five-day spate of attacks.

In Pakistan parliamentary elections have undercut the power of President Pervez Musharraf, Washington's major ally in the fight against the Taliban. To make matters worse Al-Qaeda has recruited and deployed fighters in Pakistan, an area that previously served as a backyard for its operations in Afghanistan. The story is not much better in Afghanistan where NATO's troop-contributing members are questioning their involvement. As the first decade of the 21st century comes to a close the much touted US vision of a world basking in democracy, human rights and prosperity is turning into an era of global resistance and neo-colonial wars led by the US and its allies.

It is by now abundantly clear that America's century-old drive for domination, which began with the Spanish- American war of 1898, had nothing to do with spreading democracy. Wherever it went the US planted dictatorships or propped up existing ones in much the same way as the British laid out golf courses in its colonial territories. World Wars I and II, which were mainly European affairs, a settlement of colonial accounts, were the exception. And even then the US entered World War II reluctantly.

In the Middle East the US is reliving the failed strategy it pursued in South America and Asia during the second half of the 20th century. In trying to confront nationalist aspirations that might conflict with its narrowly-defined interests it supported hated dictatorships against popular forces, driving many of the latter into the embrace of the Soviet Union. Cuba remains an example of that era of US strategy. The list of US-supported dictators, meanwhile, includes Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlevi of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Fulgencio Batista of Cuba, Anastazio Somosa of Nicaragua, General Augusto Pinochet of Chile, General Suharto of Indonesia, General Sani Abacha of Nigeria, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (now the Democratic Congo), General Zia ul-Haq in Pakistan, Ian Smith of Rhodesia and South Africa's icon of apartheid, P W Botha. In these, as in many other countries, the US placed narrow interests ahead of its professed ideals and ended up on the wrong side of the fence.

In pursuing its strategic interests the US has consistently opted for domination rather than cooperation. US vital interests in the Middle East include unimpeded access to oil. It has pursued this access in the time- honoured way of all empires aligning itself with Arab autocrats and with Israel against the great majority of the Arab nation. Peering through the Israeli prism it saw the revival of Arab nationalism as a mortal threat rather than an opportunity to promote reform, modernisation and partnership across the region. It supported Israeli aggression and expansion with the same mindset of the European settlers whose self-appointed task was to clear North America of its indigenous population. Such a colonial mentality always seeks domination by conquest -- witness the US-led against Iraq in 2003. And now it is building the case for a military strike against Iran, the last stronghold of resistance to foreign domination in the Middle East, an attack that could easily be launched by a myopic administration that remains blind to the miscalculations of its invasion of Iraq.

Such a terrifying scenario would take place against the backdrop of the US invasion and destruction of Iraq that has unleashed unprecedented forces of resistance that have armed themselves not with Arab nationalism, not with any socialist ideology, but with the power of their faith in Islam. This could be the most lethal force the US and its local allies confront for decades to come. It has already cultivated the culture of martyrdom as a form of national resistance.

President Bush has cast the confrontation with Iran in the context of World War III, a prospect he blames on Iran's development of a nuclear power programme. He does not question Israel's stockpiling of nuclear weapons. Nor does he object to the nuclear capabilities of India and Pakistan that were developed under the eyes of past US administrations. Washington has shown itself to be the leader of international hypocrisy par excellence.

President Bush entered his first term in office courtesy of the courts, not by popular vote. His election to a second term was a result of browbeating the American people with the threat of terrorism. It remains to be seen whether the 2008 presidential elections will end the rule of the half-crazed neo-cons of the Bush years. One thing, though, is sure: the policies that failed so miserably in South America will fare no better in the Middle East.