About the Muslim Brotherhood

cross-posted at Dagblog

The protest movement in Egypt has suddenly alerted many Westerners to the existence of the Muslim Brotherhood, a newish group who did not emerge in Egypt until almost the end of the Coolidge Administration. Furthermore, this fast-breaking development has alerted Western pundits, bloggers, and politicians to the urgent need to say something about the Muslim Brotherhood. And so they've starting intoning their opinions on every news medium known to man, telling us how the Muslim Brotherhood are indistinguishable from al-Qaeda, or else a group of sedate and peace-loving moderates, or else again that they "are" some other, scarier Islamist group that formed outside Egypt over the last 82 or 83 years, because that non-Egyptian group originally looked to the Brotherhood for inspiration. (By this standard, the United States "is" Liberia.)

The big question almost everybody winds up with, explicitly or implicitly, is how much we should allow the Muslim Brotherhood to participate in Egyptian politics. When you're asking yourself the same policy questions that Hosni Mubarak spent the last thirty years asking, you're not paying attention to events.

Let me lay my own cards on the table: I have spent about a week and a half of my life thinking about the Muslim Brotherhood, more than twenty years ago, and haven't thought much about them since. I won't pretend that they got my undivided attention back then. I recall writing a brief undergraduate paper about a manifesto by their founder, Hasan al-Banna, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you anything that that paper said and for most of the last two decades I've been referring to al-Banna as "Hasan al-Basra," a mistake like mixing up Martin Luther and Martin Luther King but worse. (I was off by about twelve hundred years). All of which is to say that I don't know jack about the Muslim Brotherhood. I would be embarrassed to pretend that I did.

On the other hand, it's painfully obvious that many of the people opining authoritatively about the Brotherhood haven't spent even one day in their lives thinking about the Brotherhood, and that they haven't actually started now. They're just repeating whatever they've been told recently, using their most serenely confident voices, and they aren't embarrassed in the least.

I don't know what role the Muslim Brotherhood will play in post-Mubarak Egypt. No one pontificating about it on cable has any idea, either. Maybe they'll stay committed to a civil process, as they seemed committed to peaceful participation in the last parliamentary elections. Maybe they won't. Maybe they'll be content to participate as one party among many. Maybe they will demand some "guardianship" role that puts them in charge for good. Maybe their moderate wing will predominate, and maybe their radical wing. I don't know, and I don't believe the Muslim Brotherhood themselves know yet how things are going to shake out.

But here's my question: if the Muslim Brotherhood ends up operating as a peaceful political party, content to win and lose like other Egyptian political parties and take its turns in and out of power, what's the problem? If an Islamist party can actually live by the rules of peace and democracy, how is that not a victory for Western values?

Don't get me wrong. I don't agree with the Muslim Brotherhood on almost anything. I don't believe any country should be governed by strict religious laws, I don't share the Brotherhood's particular religion, and I'm so far from being anti-Western that I'm an actual Westerner. If the Muslim Brotherhood participates in free and fair elections, I will root for them to lose every time. I think they are backward and wrong-headed in many different ways. I think most of their policies would stink. But that doesn't make them any different from other parties, in other countries, that I would also like to see lose. The fact that I, or you, or most North Americans who've heard of the Muslim Brotherhood want them to lose elections does not mean that they should not be permitted to run in the first place.

Some liberal and progressive bloggers like to deride Christianist voters and politicians as the "American Taliban," which is not quite fair. The Taliban is not only an Islamist party, but an authoritarian Islamist party that has no use for genuine elections and wants to impose its version of Shari'a law by force. The only people in America who could be justly compared to the Taliban are the people who commit or support violence against abortion clinics and against doctors like George Tiller. But if the Muslim Brotherhood becomes a non-violent party focused on promoting their version of Islamic values through legal and democratic means, they would become something very much like the American Christianist movement. In fact, they'd probably share some policy goals with American Christianists.

Some people run for office in the United States on a platform that involves banning the teaching of evolution in the schools, or limiting access to contraception. I absolutely oppose those candidates and their platform. But there is no question that they should be allowed to run for office. If someone runs for the House or Senate promising to help restore America as a "Christian nation," they have every right to do so, even if I happen to think they're wrong about everything. Banning Christianists from politics would obviously be the wrong thing to do.

Neither would the Muslim Brotherhood, if they submit to a democratic process, be meaningfully different from the various ultra-orthodox religious parties in the Israeli Knesset, who are explicitly dedicated to promoting their religious teachings through legislation (and who have a disproportionate influence on Israeli politics because of Israel's proportional-representation system). Those parties are every bit as stiff-necked, confrontational, and anti-modern as any parliamentary Muslim Brotherhood faction could be. Would a Muslim Brotherhood-led coalition complicate the Israeli/Palestinian peace process? Probably. But on the other hand, it's not like Shas has been especially constructive.

Now, if the Muslim Brotherhood decides to only participate in the democratic process when it wins, or if it decides to rig things so it never loses, then all of the above is moot. (Also, if the Brotherhood splits into two groups, one of them playing by the rules and one not, the above is true for the group that lives by the rules and not for the group that doesn't.) Any party that won't play by the rules of civil society has to go. The crucial thing is that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt submit to the same political process that every other Egyptian party does, in the same way that the American religious right and the Israeli religious right and the Hindu religious right do. People have the right to vote for these parties as long as they also have the right and the opportunity to vote against them.

The important distinction to make is between Islamism and jihadism. The first is a political ideology that I despise and oppose, but others might choose to support. The second is a violent version of Islamism, that relies on force and permits no choice by the people and is no therefore no different from any other flavor of authoritarian rule. Jihadism can never be acceptable, because it refuses to accept any viewpoint but its own. But if the United States decides that peaceful and democratic Islamist parties are still unacceptable to us, Egyptians will perceive that as a simple expression of bias against Islam. And the Egyptians will have a good case.

If the Muslim Brotherhood can manage to reinvent itself as a conventional right-wing political party but we try to prevent it from doing so, we will be the enemies of democracy and our moral case for opposing international jihadism will be undermined. We, and not the jihadists, would be the ones refusing to let the people choose for themselves. It would be stupid in any case: the Muslim Brotherhood has been banned in Egypt more or less since it was founded, and it hasn't gone away. Banning it again won't make it go away, or make it less popular. If we try to have it banned, or lean on third parties in Egypt to ban it for us, we will be playing the same losing game that Mubarak has just lost. I'd like to see the Muslim Brotherhood shut out of power forever. But the only people who can do that are the Egyptian voters themselves.

Staying Allied with Democracies

cross-posted at Dagblog

There's an old chestnut that says that two democracies have never gone to war. It's not quite true, or only true if you aggressively redefine "democracy" until you've fallen into the "no-true-Scotsman" fallacy. ("No true democracy ever goes to war with another ...." ) But it is an instructive half-truth: functional democracies very rarely go to war with one another.

That general rule is important to think about this week, as the protests in Egypt bring out America's deep ambivalence toward democracy in the Middle East, or at least in the Muslim Middle East. Of course, we all officially want democracy, and most of us instinctively want it. Nobody feels entirely comfortable being against democracy. But on the other hand, many Americans are very uncomfortable with the kind of leaders and policies that Egyptians would choose if allowed to vote freely. This ambivalence is most painfully on display in the conflicting postures taken by American opposition politicians. (To be fair, the current Administration doesn't have the luxury of taking theoretical positions on this, because it actually has to figure out a practical way to cope with events as they unfold. The Administration's conflicted thinking gets expressed less directly than its critics'.) Some conservatives have been asserting that the protests in Egypt represent Bush's "democracy promotion" agenda in action, and fault President Obama for not supporting the protesters more loudly. On the other hand, some conservative critics of Obama have clearly decided that this is not a pro-democracy movement but instead "rioting" or "unrest," which we should view as a menace. Those critics are prone to muttering darkly about the Muslim Brotherhood and running down Mohammed ElBaradei's personal character. And of course, as Kevin Drum points out, a few confused conservatives do both.

Here's the core of the problem: Mubarak is in fact a tyrant, which we dislike, but he supports our general Middle East policies. The Egyptian populace finds our general Middle East policies intolerable and infuriating, and no Egyptian government that actually reflects the popular will is likely to go along with us the way Mubarak has.

Let me go back to the question of democracies avoiding wars with other democracies. I used to assume that wars between democracies were rare because it's harder to get a voting public behind a war; I figured that democratic electorates worked as a brake on belligerence, so that democratic governments were harder to provoke into war. If American politicians want to get voters sneering at France, it's pretty easy, but if they wanted to get us behind a military invasion of Marseilles, that would be a pretty hard sell. So I was thinking that democratic governments were more likely to tolerate provocations that might constitute casus belli, and allow more time for tensions to ease.

But this is clearly not the whole story. There are a few examples of patience in the face of provocation, such as South Korea's reluctance to attack North Korea, but that's mostly about military reality. And there are plenty of examples where advanced industrial democracies grab hold of a colorable pretext for war and refuse to let go. (The explosion of the USS Maine was all the reason American voters needed to get behind the Spanish-American War, and they didn't want to hear that might have been an accident. The public wanted a good reason to fight Spain.) And surely, the lower frequency of wars between democracies isn't about shared values or common dedication to democratic principles or holding hands and singing kumbaya. Advanced democracies declare wars all the time.

What you see in practice is not that democratic nations are slower to respond to military provocation, but that they're more reluctant to give provocation to another democratic country. Some of this is about the fact that other democratic countries tend to have advanced, industrialized militaries, but that's not the whole story. (You won't see the British or French hassling Belgium, and that's not because they dread the Belgian air force.) The advanced military powers treat democratic nations much more deferentially than they treat authoritarian nations. We commit military provocations against nations run by strongmen far more easily than we commit them against countries where real elections choose the leadership. Think of the various places where we've authorized air strikes over the last twenty years or so. How many of them would you consider democracies?

If you authorize predator drone strikes in a country where the voters are actually in charge, there are two very predictable results. First, the voters will hate you. Second, they will elect a government that hates you, and demand that that government actively oppose you. Nobody gets re-elected by backing foreign aerial bombardment of the homeland. Can you imagine? If Pakistan and Yemen were functioning democracies, we wouldn't be sending drones to destroy villages where jihadists might be hiding. Doing so would quickly bring the fall of any pro-American government and lead to the rise of an aggressively anti-American one, probably for a generation or two. There are jihadists lurking somewhere in Hamburg, too, but we're not sending predator drones or a Special Forces detachment after them. Everyone understands that if we did that we would be antagonizing the German people and that they would not get over it.

But when you're dealing with dictatorships, juntas, Communist oligarchies, and so on, you tend to count popular opinion out. After all, public sentiment can't replace the dictator, junta, or Politburo. Having the folks on the ground love or hate your country more than they did last year doesn't make any immediately apparent difference. It's natural to focus on how the people at the top respond to your actions. So, if you're having static with Muammar Qadhafi and you feel bombing some targets in Libya will get him in line, that seems like the logical course of action. Sure, the average Libyan might hate the US because of those strikes, maybe for a generation or so, but it's not like that changes anything in the short term. If Qadhafi takes his beating quietly and backs down, it looks like a satisfactory Libya policy. If Saddam Hussein attempts to have a former US President assassinated, you authorize an air strike on his intelligence headquarters in Baghdad. That works like a charm in terms of managing Saddam Hussein and his intelligence apparatus; they learned that specific lesson pretty well. How the rest of the citizens of Baghdad felt about having their city attacked by planes was beside the point as long as Hussein was in power. Their support wasn't any real help to us, and their resentment didn't hurt us. It wasn't like we needed them to vote for some hypothetical pro-American political party, right?

Even if your own country is a democracy, the demands of policy can easily lead you into viewing the people of a dictatorship through the dictator's eyes. He ignores what they want, so you do as well. You would never just ignore what the French or British or Canadian public wants, not completely, because the consequences of doing that are obvious. If you're dealing with a country where the people have a say, you pay attention to those people. If you're dealing with a country where only a few people have a say, you only pay attention to those few people. This approach works just fine, until it doesn't. When only Saddam Hussein made the decisions, taking out his radar installations every few weeks was a very useful tool for managing his behavior. Then one day you find you've committed yourself to free and fair elections in a country where large swaths of the public hate your guts and you're still fighting armed irregulars every day. That's when it turns out that Iraqi voters have been forming their personal opinions of the United States for a long, long time.

In the same way we feel freer to attack countries where the people can't vote, we feel freer to use military force in areas controlled by authoritarian allies. If the CIA wants to kidnap a jihadist off the street in Italy, and apparently they sometimes do, that has to be a clandestine operation because it's going to antagonize ordinary Italians. If the CIA wants to launch a missile strike at a target in Pakistan or Yemen, there's nothing clandestine about it. We make our deals with the Pakistani and Yemeni leadership, so it doesn't matter if the general population is upset. Until, of course, it does.

This is how we've gotten ourselves into this bind: decades of a Middle East policy that ignored what everyday Arabs wanted, no matter how badly they wanted it, because everyday Arabs didn't get a say. It's not that we didn't share the same views of Israel and Palestine that everyday Arabs did; you don't need absolute agreement to have a sane dialogue. It's that we utterly ignored everyone in the Arab street, because we were dealing with the guy in the palace. The various Arab sultans and generalissimos might have been willing to tolerate some of the uglier episodes in the ongoing Israel-Palestine debacle, because they were paid to tolerate it. The sultans and generalissimos might have gone along with the invasion of Iraq, because it was in their interests to go along. But the people on the street, the people who in any democracy would be the voters, weren't getting rewarded for going along with our policies. They were simply watching other Arabs die on the TV news. They didn't like it. They're not going to like it tomorrow, either.