The Bush Visit to the Middle East has been surprisingly low key.  The only sensible way to regard this is as a sign of its importance.The President is engaged in serious and difficult diplomacy of considerable importance to America and world peace. He is not about to ‘blow it’ by shooting from the hip just to get headlines back home.

In this sense, the Hormuz incident was the lapse in political judgement [it was 'spin' that no one took seriously on either side] that proved the point. You do not play such a game of diplomatic chess by announcing your moves to the public in advance and performing media conjuring tricks for the boondocks. 

The New Realism

As we write, the President is in the Gulf, causing consternation to liberals by playing down democracy and emphasizing the importance of local alliances, notably the UAE. This is a charm offensive directed at pulling the GCC away from further links with Iran.

His commendations for reform, where he made them, were interesting – Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Yemen – with only the barest implicit criticism of one country, Egypt, and then only because of its treatment of America's preferred liberal technocrat, Ayman Nour.

There was no tub-thumping demand for an intensification of democratic reform and every sign that America would be 'understanding' to its allies.

Reforms have, in fact, taken place, but mostly in the direction of the rule of law and human rights rather than of democracy - but they have also been small-scale and have stalled or even slightly reversed in recent months. The Financial Times made a point today in reporting disappointment amongst liberal democrats in Bahrain. 

Unfortunately for the West, more democracy in Bahrain would mean a growth in Shia influence. Shia Muslims are 60% of the population. Shia Islamists have 17 seats in the 40-seat Assembly but its power is limited by a traditionally authoritarian dynasty that can backslide on human rights whenever it wants to.

The US Strategy for Democracy

Americans seem reluctant to encourage democracy whenever the wrong side is likely to win – whether Shia Islamism in Bahrain and Hamas in Palestine. If we have 'guided democracy' from Russia and China, then we appear to have 'conditional democracy' as the West's response. 

State Department strategists want to take it slow and easy, hoping that ‘bourgeois’ conservative reform parties, supportive of the establishment and pro-Western, on the Turkish model, can emerge to take advantage of the sustained economic growth that will come from integration with the 'free' (aka liberal capitalist) world.

Imagine a Saudi democracy today, with an electorate under pressure from inflation and with no judicial or educational reforms in place! It would be a recipe for something only a little less Islamist than the Taliban.

So, the game is regional stabilization and building a strong Sunni conservative alliance against the most democratic state (other than Israel) in the region – Iran.

The Economic Basis for Islamist Democracy

This aspect, involving the formation of an alliance between economic interests against anti-imperialist regime, is easily forgotten. Whenever push has come to shove, right economic arrangements have always trumped liberal democratic ideology in US assessments of how to handle international security. 

It cannot be an accident that Gulf capital is now preparing to invest heavily in re-capitalising major Wall Street banks like Citigroup and Merrill Lynch nor that the ‘hot tip’ is that the MIKSA order contract will go to Raytheon nor that Dubai will be investing $600m in a new logistics hub in the poorest part of the Deep South, South Carolina (an announcement made just days before its Primary), nor that one of President Bush’s first acts on his return to Washington will be to present a $20bn arms deal to Congress for approval.

The Economist last week claimed that Arabs were ‘in a gloomy mood’. The article probably told us more about the world seen from the point of view of the London liberal elite than the mood of 'real' Arabs in 'real' Araby but the article is still worth reading as a summary of what Western policymakers expect Arabs to think and feel.

The Western liberal intelligentsiya is not happy but the conflict between them and the policymakers is not over intention but speed and the price of haste. The professionals are learning caution.

Both see reform in the region as essential but the policymakers, with Pakistan as a current case study in real time of the dangers of opening the Pandora's box of democracy without considering consequences, may be getting especially cautious about interventions that alienate partner elites who feel they have enough on their plate in maintaining the internal stability of their states.

The Idea of Islamist Democracy

Current attention (somewhat belatedly given blunders over Algeria in the early 1990s and more recently over Turkish entry into Europe) is being focused on Islamic democracy as a force in the Middle East analogous to Christian democracy in post-war Europe. Then, the issue was the Soviet Union and communism and now it is Iran and all forms of radical Islamism.

This model, faith-based in terms of values and so inimical to the true secularist, represents a stabilizing conservative pro-business force that can isolate and contain extremists and eliminate the types of nationalisms and socialisms that the higher ranks of the West so intensely dislike.

US strategies for democracy are rarely expressed in these terms as perhaps too indicative of manipulation from outside and as puzzling to many indigenous Americans and European liberals. Nevertheless, conservative Islamist Democracy is, in the eyes of the West, the democracy that is going to be most useful to Western interests.

It is surely no accident that hard line liberal internationalist Tony Blair has not merely converted to Catholicism but is getting ready to launch his new inter-faith foundation as ideological vanguard for an understanding between the three main 'abrahamanic' faiths.

By way of comparison last week's Economist had a major article on Islam in Indonesia. Indonesia is a key US ally in stabilising a zone (South East Asia) that is often forgotten in assessments of the front line between Islamism and the West.

The Economist seems much heartened by the fact that Political Islam is developing along lines closer to the Turkish than the radical model. Under this model, Islamists moderate as they acquire power – which outcome should be no surprise to anyone who is not a hard line Zionist or neo-conservative.

Capturing The Ideological High Ground

The amount of intellectual labour going on in Western-influenced Muslim centres to demonstrate that Islam and democracy are wholly compatible is considerable.

It is very consciously modeled on the same process that forced the Vatican into line after its authoritarian experiments in the 1920s and 1930s had, to its internal and eternal shame, crumbled into mass murder and mayhem.

However, the Western analysis remains essentially materialist. To the West, the crisis in the region is not spiritual (as the extremists claim) but very material. The spiritual element is merely co-opted on the basis that it wants to shepherd men's souls and render everything else unto Caesar - a suitably Christian sentiment but not one that can be sold so easily to Islamists.

To succeed, economies need to grow in order to create jobs if stability is to be maintained. This means a market-orientated economy with an educated work force operating along economically liberal lines.

Since you cannot 'secularise' an entire culture over night without provoking dissent and insurgency, what you do is encourage faith-based culture into a path of modernisation by merging its cultural and social policies (conservative) with the process of decisionmaking required by the realities of market economics but in a constitutional context emphasising the rule of law (if only for reasons of contract) and then democracy.

Western strategists are not really interested in their agents of change being ‘morally good’ or even immediately ‘competent’ but only effective in getting from the unstable present to the stable future - as an issue of national and economic security. 

The West backed the far from good or competent Bhutto precisely because she was promising to build and sustain the Islamic democratic model against extreme alternatives and so ensure a stable base from which to wage war on intransigent extremists.

Building A Client Base

The US is now slowly building up its 'bank' of technocratic and 'big man' clients – from people like Karzai and Abbas in small states to people like President Gul and General Kayani in large states.  They have been picked to ‘partner’ the West in regional transformation, although this does mean partner and not puppet as some would like to think.

Their physical and political survival, especially against assassination, insurgency and imported populism, is now a strategic issue. On the other hand, they can make demands in return - as Karzai has done over opium crop eradication and Gul over the PKK.  Power has evened up a bit.

But much of the intellectual energy behind this ‘new thinking’ is not only not centred on the West, it is still far too obviously dependent on Western subvention in cash or in kind. These are civil society initiatives that have the State Department, UK Foreign Office and various NATO countries' institutions written all over them.

Things may not be all plain sailing by any means. Christian Democracy appeared only as a concession after a bloody defeat in the field. 

To this day there are minority Vatican factions who would quite happily return to theocracy and authority or to the sort of 'castor oil' corporatism of a Mussolini or a Franco but even Fini and Aznar, heirs to those traditions, have to embrace the liberal democratic settlement that took place between the 1940s and 1970s in Europe.

The radical ‘spiritual’ version of Islamism is in a stronger position than Catholicism in 1947, partly because it can rely on much more intense levels of genuine grievance and what Westerners call ‘ignorance’. Nor are the Islamists exhausted after a defeat in a world war.

The Primacy of Economics Again

In the end, the West can only operate effectively through its superior wealth. It is interesting to see how many 'peace initiatives' actually depend on the application at some point of economic regeneration through transfers of funds - much as the basis for the success of Christian Democracy and its centre-left anti-Soviet equivalent required the Marshall Plan. 

In effect, the West has to find a way to buy out or 'bribe' sufficient numbers of the discontented in order to isolate them from those who would 'exploit' them.

Such subsidies or 'bribes' remind one of the strategy of the late Roman Empire to keep the barbarians from spilling over the frontier, so (the story goes) the only long term solution must be closer to the strategy of the earlier Empire, by integrating conquered elites into 'civilisation'.

Above all, this means identifying and integrating new ‘bourgeois’ leadership cadres into the global economy and buying into hungry young intellectuals’ desperate obsessions with recognition.

This targeting of ambitious young middle class men and women, especially those who can travel easily between the region and the West, is not dissimilar to the strategy adopted against the Soviet Empire in the Reagan era and we can already observe it in operation amongst diaspora Arabs and Iranians.

If this is matched with real economic growth (as we have seen in the recent past in Pakistan) and with Western respect for indigenous cultural forms, then we may well see a process that will eventually lead to an Arab or Muslim Union as strong as the European Union in fifty or sixty years  time.

What May Go Right ... And Wrong

In such a model, pro-Western business-orientated Islamic Democrats will face off mildly nationalist centre-left and more conservative parties in what will pass for democracy - if we do not look too closely in every case. Well, that's the dream.

Ay, there’s the rub! There are many unknown unknowns. 

What if the West’s own economy falters, or the hardliners capture just one pivotal State to create a Sunni Iran, or if Iran itself learns to speak across Sunni-Shia barriers and stays populist and anti-imperialist, or if ‘bourgeois’ promises result only in income disparities, inflation and pauperization, or if the new wave of pro-Western Islamists ‘sell out’ through corruption or concessions to the West and alienate their own populations …

The ‘what ifs’ are endless … but any one of them may mean that this programme of management will not only fail but will feed its own failure by being exposed (as may be happening in Pakistan) as subversion by 'imperialists'.

Already Pakistan is rife with talk of Western involvement in its internal affairs and Iranian liberals have been damaged by the suggestion that they are operating in the interests of an enemy state. Arab populations are negatively sensitised to intervention whereas European populations in the late 1940s were grateful for it.

We’ll see – but the agenda on the ground will not be set by some “glossy Muslim monthly” edited from Boston any more than Russia’s agenda was ever going to be set in the long run by Russian-Americans educated with MBAs from Harvard.

www.tppr.co.uk