David Gardner, Chief Leader Writer and Associate Editor at the Financial Times, asks in his book, Last Chance: The Middle East in the Balance, why the Arab world has not experienced the same surge of democratization as other regions in the last century. He chatted with Zócalo about the “Arab exception” and the role of the West in perpetuating it.

Q. What led you to write this book, and briefly, what argument do you make?

A. What led me to write it really is that we have a region mired in despotism and tyranny and different forms of autocracy, and the U.S. and the Western countries pretty much without exception have for a very long period – throughout most of the last century and continuing into this one – propped up a network of regional strongmen in the interest of short-term stability. This has unleashed a blind rage within the broader Middle East and across the Muslim world against the West. That really really does need to change.

This collusion and local autocracy has created what is in effect an ‘Arab exception,’ which has left the Arabs marooned as waves of democracy have broken over practically everywhere else in the world – Eastern Europe, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia. I think pretty much in no other part of the world – not even China –  has the West operated with so little regard for the human and political rights of local citizens.

There is an analogy that I draw. The West has an almost morbid fear of political Islam, which is obviously fed and exaggerated by its local client rulers, and has served to deny Arabs democracy in case they support Islamist parties, just as during the Cold War, Latin Americans, Asians, and Africans had to endure Western-endorsed dictatorship in case they supported Communism. And whereas now you won’t find anybody who springs to the defense of the Pinochets and the Mubutus and so on, you will find people who spring to the defense of the Mubaraks, the King Abdullahs, and so on. [Westerners] frequently don’t, at least in policy terms, draw any conclusions from this or learn any lessons. That in essence is what the book is about.

Q. Aren’t there dangers in supporting democracy, particularly if Islamic parties win, in the short-run?

A. Oh yes. Anybody who says support for democracy is going to automatically translate into stability is probably kidding themselves. It won’t really do that. Nor will it necessarily look very Jeffersonian. It could open a period of what to us will look like fairly illiberal politics. But one needs to measure that against the alternative. Our collusion in tyranny as the ostensibly lesser evil to political Islam has created a situation of pretty much blanket hostility of Arabs and Muslims against the West. The danger is that we are driving them into the arms of the jihadists, who, as you know, are aided by the backlash against U.S. policy in Iran, Palestine, and elsewhere, and are trying to enter the Muslim mainstream, which is not a complete dream. Their situation at the moment is that there are millions or tens of millions of Islamists, and thousands or tens of thousands of jihadists. We need to make sure the Islamists – who come in different varieties, fortunately – have the opportunity to express themselves democratically and adhere to democratic norms, because they’re there, and we can’t really shut them out. We’ve almost engineered or helped engineer a situation in which they are the center of political gravity. If we support dictatorships that have swept almost the entire political spectrum of any form of dissent, and leave their people no refuge, no rallying point, no ability to regroup except in the mosque and the madrassa, the Islamic schools, we have pretty much guaranteed that the future form of politics in these countries will be heavily influenced by Islamism.

The second comparison I would make is experience in our own countries. We should be able to see the similarities between Islamism and 19th century nationalism in Europe. Both started as a forced march into the future but then detoured in sinister and destructive ways – in Europe, obviously, fascism, and now in the Islamic context, this jihadist cult of death. Any sane policy would be devoted to avoiding the lethal form of radical Islam. The way to do that is in no small part to find a space for thoughtful Islamism to emerge. You do find this, it exists. The best example so far, which is not in the Arab world but mesmerizes political thinkers in the Arab world is Turkey, where you have a ruling party, the Justice and Development or so-called AKP party led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which was put together from the wreckage of two failed Islamist parties. You might call it neo-Islamist or evolved Islamist, and it has taken in a large part of the traditional small- to medium-sized business classes of Anatolia, the land mass of Turkey. These are people who are conservatives, they are observant, often pious Muslims, but they’re very dynamic at the same time. They want a modern party, a bit like the evolution in Europe and particularly in Latin America of Christian democracy. This is a Muslim democracy. I’m not saying by any means that that can translate as a model. But what I am saying is that it is a success, and for that reason is very attractive to people in countries that are still mired in tyranny – because success sells.

Q. How do two countries on the periphery of the Arab world – Iran and Pakistan – relate to the Arab world and impact U.S. policy there?

A. Pakistan is an example of how to get it almost precisely wrong, so far as Western policy is concerned. Yet again we put all our money on a local strongman – and I do mean literally money, $12 billion, on General Musharraf, conceiving him to be part of the solution when he’s clearly part of the problem. We ignored the mainstream political parties and stood by as he marginalized them and gave much much greater space to radical Islamist parties. He would find his allies anywhere he could – and was obviously the head of an army which had relationships with jihadi groups – for pursuing his policy in Kashmir and keeping the door in Afghanistan closed, so India couldn’t have a dagger at their backs, so to speak. This went on with the justification that he was an absolutely vital ally in the War on Terror, but actually, during his period in office, the jihadi phenomenon grew exponentially with results we can now see, calling into question the survival of the Pakistani state. We’ve repeated in spades all the mistakes that have been made in the Arab world, except that the Arab state systems are probably slightly more resilient than Pakistan’s, which is a loose multiethnic federation. These are really serious policy errors.

In Iran, the story is different. There, what we have to recognize is missed opportunities, of which there are two, principally. One, in 1997 to 1998, when you had a reformist government under President Khatami coming to power in what was more than a landslide, an avalanche of votes and determined to place the country on a firmer constitutional basis under the rule of law, with primacy to citizens’ rights. There was an attempt under the Clinton administration to reach some sort of rapprochement with Iran.

Again, in May 2003, the Iranians, with the imprimatur of the Supreme Leader Khamenei,  actually offered a detailed grand bargain with the U.S. to settle all outstanding differences, ranging from Iranian support for insurgent organizations to the nuclear dossier and so on. This was simply rejected, it wasn’t even looked at. This document exists, we know, it’s been published. It was passed to Washington through the Swiss Foreign Ministry, which acts for U.S. interests Iran. I think the Obama administration recognizes that and is still – despite the difficulties at the present, this sort of electoral coup that’s taken place in Iran – is determined eventually to explore the possibility of engaging and reaching agreement on these sorts of issues.

Having said all that, I’m quite encouraged by the Obama speech in Cairo, which addressed a whole number of issues. The main focus tended to be on what he had to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but in that speech also I think was a fairly determined assertion of universal values, including democracy, and he said it in Cairo. Now we’ll see what it is he actually does. People remember Condoleezza Rice gave a resounding speech in Cairo in favor of democracy in I believe June 2005 in which she said the U.S. has pursued stability at the expense of democracy and has ended up with neither. She went on to say we’ve learnt our lesson and will align with everyone who stands up for freedom, prosperity and security, and against tyranny, which breeds despair, humiliation, and terror.

Bush himself a few years earlier in 2003 had also made similar sorts of remarks, and in particular dismissed what he called the culture of condescension that suggests Arabs and Muslims were unsuited to democracy. But you know – other than their taking a sledgehammer to Iraq, which was the weakest link in the chain of the Arab world – not much happened at all. The countries the Bush administration targeted for redemption, as it were, they had almost zero knowledge of them or how to go about it. Secretary Rice for example brought to this job a sort of Cold Warrior mindset in which it seems to me she was reading over the idea of the Soviet buffer state into a wholly different environment in which we the West had been backing, as it were, the local variant of Stalinism. Then you have the neoconservative gaggle that provided the philosophy, who seemed to think the Middle East was sort of a ten-pin bowling alley – you hit the front pin hard enough, Iraq, and the rest would simply skittle over. What I think really brought the so-called freedom agenda to a jutting halt was the electoral success of Islamism: partially in Egypt; in Iraq, where they won two-thirds of the seats in parliament; in Palestine, where Hamas trashed Fatah; and in Lebanon, with Hezbollah. As I was saying, we pretty much guaranteed that outcome after a century of collusion with local despots who in effect suppressed all challenge, leaving their citizens nowhere else to go. In reality the option we have is to learn to manage the consequences, to learn how to live with Islamists.

Q. How does the Arab world feel about the U.S.’s shifting its emphasis in the war on terror from Iraq to Afghanistan?

A. Uncomfortable. What I would say is this: I think there was a general understanding after 9/11 that it was inevitable, and that there was a justice in attacking the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Where that all became muddied was when they swiveled around their fight and went after Iraq. The perception then became, what the U.S. and its allies, such as the Blair government, had embarked on was a war against Islam. It’s quite different to row back from that. Although, I think people do see that there is, I would have thought, pretty close to, if not quite zero, but very little sympathy for the activity of, say, the Pakistani Taliban, and the savagery with which they impose their government and their form of justice on Muslims. Who is it that they kill? They kill 90% Muslims. There is, I’m afraid because Iraq so muddied the waters, a great deal of suspicion. I think there’s even a wider suspicion, even among people who can see the logic of what’s going on, as to what the stamina of the U.S. and NATO is in Afghanistan, how long are they going to stick around and indeed how competent are they to try and impose some sort of order on a country like Afghanistan. At a time when that conflict has spread into the broader region, not just into Pakistan but – as we saw last November with the attack on Mumbai – into the Indian subcontinent as a whole. For example, therefore, many Muslims would say, so does this mean as part of the attempt to settle this entire problem they’re going to address the issue of Kashmir, which is diplomatically incredibly sensitive, certainly to the Indians? It’s a mixed and ambivalent reaction really.

*Photo of Istanbul courtesy of Oberazzi.