Don’t Expect Arab Democracy Anytime Soon

Those expecting democracy to spring to life in Iraq soon
after an allied invasion might wish to recall the fate of another Arab
strongman from 36 years ago.

In June, 1967, Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser was
sitting in the darkened studios of Cairo Radio, with barely a candle to
illuminate his script. His voice cracking, he delivered his political
testament:

“We expected the enemy to come from the east and the north,
but instead he came from the west. I must accept full responsibility for this
disaster that has befallen us and must now resign as your president.”

No sooner had he spoken than the hum of Israeli Mysteres
could be heard in the skies above the city and the crack of anti-aircraft
batteries filled the air.

Nasser had just led his country into one of the most
humiliating military debacles in history. In the course of three days, the
Israeli army, responding to months of Egyptian provocation, had destroyed the
Egyptian air force and crushed an army five times its size. It now stood at the
gates of Cairo.

In any modern Western country, such a catastrophe would
precipitate a leadership crisis. But that was not to be Nasser’s fate. No
sooner did he deliver his valedictory address than the streets of downtown Cairo
were filled with hundreds of thousands of men, women and children.

“All of a sudden,” recounted Mahmoud Raid, an Egyptian
journalist, “I found myself wading through multitudes of people clamoring for Nasser
to stay.”

Within hours, messages of support arrived from the rest of Egypt
and from the leaders of many other Middle Eastern countries — all of whom had
ample reason to mock the presumed leader of the Arab world, yet all of whom
urged him to remain.

Many suspected that Nasser, in his usual theatrical style,
had orchestrated the mass demonstration. But Eric Rouleau, the Middle East
correspondent for Le Monde at the time, would have none of it:

“People may have despised Nasser for leading them to
disaster, but they also loved him as a father. And the Egyptians did not want
to be left fatherless.”

In focusing on the paternal relationship between Nasser and
his people, Rouleau identified something significant about Arab political
systems. Dictatorships thrive in the Arab world because strong men are admired
and fill the authoritarian role in the popular imagination usually allocated to
the father in traditional Arab society.

The Arab nuclear family is dominated by the father whose
authority is total. Mothers and daughters play submissive roles within this
structure and have little influence on the family’s destiny. Sons are much
desired, their role being largely to satisfy their father’s sense of honor and
secure his position in society. Absolute obedience is expected of them and
severe punishment meted out for waywardness. From childhood then, Arabs become
accustomed to a high level of absolute authority where challenge and
questioning — the root of free and democratic society — is not encouraged.
Instead, undivided respect and subservience is reserved for a single man.

Given this paternalistic structure, it should come as little
surprise that the political culture mirrors the social hierarchy. Reposing
faith in the beneficence of the strong man is a natural consequence of the Arab
world’s societal atrophy. It produces an emotional dependence on leaders and
political systems with no elasticity.

Dictatorships therefore thrive in the Arab world in much the
same way autocracy has always flourished in Russia: the leader is a cult
figure, whose unquestioned authority and arbitrary power will, it is assumed,
always be exercised for the good of his population. The adulation that
consistently greets the failures of such leaders as Nasser, Iraq’s Saddam
Hussein and Libya’s Mummar Qaddafi is directly attributable to the need of the
Arab street not to be left either fatherless or orphaned.

While an American invasion will almost certainly assure the
fall of Saddam, it is foolish to believe that democracy will gain an immediate
and firm foothold in a liberated Iraq. Without social and cultural reform, the
emergence of a new strongman, more partial to the West perhaps, but no less
determined to squelch resistance to his rule than Saddam, is almost certain.

Not until Arab social and cultural systems are reformed can
the West be assured that political systems enshrining freedom and human dignity
will take root in the Arab world. And that, sadly, will take a level of
self-mobilization for which the nations of the Middle East are not yet
prepared.  

Avi Davis is the senior fellow of the Freeman Center for Strategic studies in Los Angeles and the senior editorial columnist for the online magazine Jewsweek.com . Dr. Khaleel Mohammed is a Kraft-Hiatt postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Brandeis University.