A democratic momentum: Bush and his allies have done important things; the clerics in Iran cast a shadow

IN one significant speech after another, President Bush stresses that he is on the side of democratic reformers, that he supports "democratic transitions in practical ways," and that the cornerstone of his second-term foreign policy is to promote democracy, "particularly in the Arab world." The concept is simplicity itself--too simple according to Western critics, but not to Arabs. In a tone of wonder, the leftist German magazine Der Spiegel spoke for flabbergasted onlookers with the question posed by its recent cover story: "Could George W. Bush Be Right?" Yes, he could: He is advancing freedom. Relapses are always possible, of course, but suddenly today's Arab order is shaking with unprecedented hope.

Anyone with experience of the Arab Middle East will have found a civilization that does not know what to do with itself. Freedom and democracy have been unknown quantities. The manners and grace of the past are almost irrecoverable. Creativity is blocked in all spheres by despotisms grinding down everything. One after another, ambitious and ruthless men have seized power and held it on the principle that force is the only law. Most of them have been soldiers, though a few have been monarchs claiming a right to rule through their Islamic affiliations. The coups, wars, and civil wars of these absolute rulers have left innumerable victims. The human waste is tragic. Worse still, the strong oppress the weak and degrade society in a way that cannot be stopped from within, and so would repeat itself forever.

The model of the strong ruler is Gamal Abdul Nasser, far and away the most influential Arab of the 20th century. He had the chance to turn an independent Egypt into a modern nation-state. Instead, he believed that greater strength would come from Arab nationalism. The Arabs are not one people, however, and Arab nationalism set them at each other's throats rather than uniting them. Nasser compounded his mistake by throwing his lot in with the Soviet Union. Rulers in Syria and Iraq and Libya followed the lead. So did Yasser Arafat. Together they condemned the Middle East to be a bloody arena of the Cold War, and what should have been independent nation-states instead turned into slummy and sovietized dictatorships.

The strength of these dictatorships was more apparent than real, actually a facade behind which the military and secret police were carrying out the dirty work. How strong could any Arab ruler be if the Soviets and the Americans (never mind the Israelis) were stronger? Realization of weakness has led to pervasive self-pity. Arabs tend to absolve themselves of their failures, blaming them instead on the various Westerners, imperialists, Zionists, infidels, who are so unfairly strong. And out of the painful but unexamined sense of failure has grown Islamism, a religious version of Arab nationalism, positing that Arabs are one people united by their faith, and therefore in no need of nation-states. Fueling Islamism is that same pervasive sense of self-pity that converts into aggression.

Democratization and the creation of valid nation-states is the only alternative to Arab nationalism and Islamism alike. Democratization will allow Arabs in each of their countries to take their destiny into their own hands, at last in a position to jettison self-pity and the aggression that springs out of it, and able to meet Americans, Israelis, and everyone else on equal terms. September 11 is the unlikely trigger for democratization, but such is the cunning of history.

THE ISLAMIST CHALLENGE

That attack was the moment when the ideology of Islamism superseded an Arab nationalism that was evidently no longer serviceable either as a tool for mobilizing Arabs or for rivaling the West. Islamism had been gathering strength since Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in Iran in classic style, and installed his version of a police state. One way or another, Islamist Iran challenged Arabs to emulate it, and Saudi Arabia--and Osama bin Laden in particular--took up the challenge.

Islamism is capable of degrading the Arab world still further, while also taking the West down with it in a way that Arab nationalism could not. Critics like to maintain that Islamism is in the mind, and therefore can only be fought at the intellectual level. On the contrary, the campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan has shown the positive results of occupying territory. The successful democratization of an Arab state would refute the pretensions of Islamist ideology, and Iraq is the obvious--perhaps the only--country in which to launch such a process. It has all the resources necessary to become a modern nation-state. Furthermore, the Iraqi Shiites and the (non-Arab) Kurds are not Arab nationalists, nor are they Islamists after the Iranian fashion.

Among other immediate benefits, the invasion of Iraq marks the delayed lifting from the Middle East of the Cold War and its consequences. Saddam Hussein was not a Soviet client, to be sure, but he was a faithful pupil of Nasser's and of Stalin's. In that role, he sponsored Arafat and the Palestinian intifada. The Israeli-Palestinian struggle is a Cold War relic if ever there was one, and the timely removal of both Saddam and Arafat opens a prospect of negotiations free from the previous considerations of maximizing power in the region. The Palestinians themselves are talking about "a real change on the ground."