Hearts and Minds, Then Democracy, for Morocco?
There is an “inherent tension” between democratization and the war of ideas against radical Islam, says a leading Middle East specialist. “Democracy promotion and the hearts-and-minds campaign are first cousins, not identical twins,” argues Robert Satloff, executive director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“Democratization is about creating rules, institutions, and patterns of behavior in which local people can determine their own future, peacefully, over time,” Satloff argues, whereas the ideological struggle “is about empowering local people to defeat the creeping totalitarianism of radical Islamists. Without victory in the latter struggle, the former stands no chance.”

Reflecting on two years spent in Morocco, Satloff endorses the US 9-11 Commission's stress on the importance of defeating “the ideology from which terrorists spring, i.e., radical Islamism.” Faulting US public diplomacy, he suggests that the “most important element in U.S. public diplomacy -- the need to invest in both current allies and the potential for future ones--is the least valued.” Anti-Islamist Moroccans believe the US “sends the wrong message” when it funds Islamist political activity, such as parliamentary training for Islamist legislators to become more effective critics of the government. Promoting English-language education should be America's top priority, he argues. Satloff's engaging argument suggests an affinity with that of Fareed Zakaria, who has urged the world's democracies to accept liberal autocracies, under which inexperienced peoples learn the culture of democracy, before pressing ahead with elections. To hold elections before the people are prepared poses the risk that extremists will triumph and impose more drastic or even totalitarian repression.

The Zakaria/Satloff position has been criticized by analysts who, invoking something akin to Deweyian "learning by doing" pedagogy, argue that "the road to constitutional liberalism in today's world runs not through unaccountable autocracies but through freely elected governments." "Elections, if they are truly competitive, tend to arouse citizens to insist upon their rights and upon the accountability of elected officials,” argue Carl Gershman and Marc Plattner, for whom “the process makes government more subject to public scrutiny.”

European Commission Funds Palestinian Reform and Investigates Terror Link
The European Commission has committed a further €124.25 million ($150 million) to the Palestinian Authority. Some €26m will be released to a new Public Financial Management Reform Trust Fund established by the World Bank. European Community assistance to the PA, intended to address urgent needs and “contribute to the creation of a viable and democratic Palestinian state,” will this year total €250 million.

EU Commissioner for External Relations Chris Patten says EU assistance will “enable the whole donor community to build on the EU's record of achieving Palestinian Authority reform by attaching clear conditions to the delivery of financial assistance.” Some €5 million was allocated specifically for the implementation of the PA's reform agenda to advance reforms in Palestinian administration, especially financial control, and good governance.

OLAF, the EU's anti-fraud unit, announced this week that it would like to interview Palestinians held in Israeli prisons about alleged abuse of EU funding. Last year OLAF launched an investigation following allegations that EU funds to the Palestinian Authority (PA) had fallen into the hands of terrorists. Israel will probably allow access to the prisoners, hoping to confirm its own suspicions that EU funding was transferred from the PA to Fatah members to the 'Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades,' a group on the EU's terror list.

… as PA Governance Crisis Worsens
Palestinian Authority leader Yasir Arafat's complicity with corruption "has diminished the Palestinians' trust in the government and has rendered it obsolete," says Marwan Bishara, a visiting professor of international relations at the American University of Paris. Arafat's inertia has prompted two key groups to demand change. Frustrated young militants want an end to corruption and more aggressive actions against Israel, while a second group of disenfranchised leaders are concerned for their own safety and standing. These "moderates" want Arafat to consolidate the security forces and delegate authority in accordance with Palestinian basic law.

Nabil Amr, an ex-information minister, was shot and seriously wounded last week after openly criticizing the PA leader. A Nablus meeting of such Fatah reformers was forcibly broken up this week by armed Arafat loyalists.

Mohammed Dahlan, a former Arafat protégé, now accuses his former patron of squandering $5 billion of foreign aid and "sitting on the corpses" of Palestinians. He has given Arafat until 10 August to implement reforms or face mass protests. Yet Dahlan himself is hardly a model of probity and transparency, having accumulated considerable wealth through "commissions" from fuel imports entering the Gaza Strip.

Some commentators believe reform of Fatah, the Palestinians' ruling party, is feasible. The party "badly needs a mechanism by which the people can have a say in their own government," says Daoud Kuttab, an award-winning Palestinian journalist, who was imprisoned for reporting PA corruption. "It needs a more equitable approach to power-sharing, and it must have a check on one-man rule," says the director of AmmanNet, the Arab world's first independent Internet radio.

Other observers are less sanguine. "Unfortunately, it's not a fight between the good and bad — it's between the bad and worse," says Bassam Eid a Palestinian human rights activist. "It's not a real fight against corruption, but if other forces are drawn in, it could become a real revolt against Arafat's authority."

A Palestinian official once said, "Egyptian politics is like the pyramid: President Hosni Mubarak is at the top, and there's a very wide base. Syrian politics is like the Eiffel Tower: President Hafez al-Assad [today his son, Bashar] is at the top, and there are a few people on each level. Palestinian politics is the shape of Yasir Arafat: Yasir Arafat is Palestinian politics and that's all there is to it."

Arafat possesses legendary survival skills but even his traditional allies are suggesting that "the vital task of fighting corruption and building a credible Palestinian political system based on transparency and accountability would be made much easier if the president did step down."

There is also pressure for greater media freedom in areas under PA authority. The International Federation of Journalists has called on Gazan journalists to reconsider their attempts to prevent reporters from covering protests by militants, or other indications of internal strife. Aidan White, IFJ General Secretary, asked the Gaza section of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate to revoke its call for a ban on reporting statements that reflect internal division and its demand that journalists provide coverage that supports "national unity and the protection of the internal front". "This is a critical moment for the Palestinian people," said White. "What they need now is the truth and lots of it, not censorship and a culture of fear." The IFJ represents over 500,000 journalists in more than 110 countries.

And all that Jaz-eera!
Freedom of information and the free media are widely recognized as pre-requisites of democratic development. Hence much debate about the Qatar-based Arabic television station al-Jazeera. The US 9/11 Commission report has a pointed reference: "Local newspapers and the few influential satellite broadcasters —like al Jazeera —often reinforce the jihadist theme that portrays the United States as anti-Muslim."

Is al-Jazeera the propaganda tool of Islamic extremists, or the sometimes flawed but nevertheless promising seed of a new and unfettered media in the Arab-speaking world? Reasoned arguments come to quite different conclusions.

Michael Moran, senior producer at MSNBC.com and former BBC hand, argues that the network "is the lone Arabic broadcast outlet to put truth and objectivity above even its survival”. He notes that the station has been attacked by virtually every government in the Middle East and that the network's bureaux are periodically closed because of its insistence on airing stories about government corruption in the region. “Israeli officials and journalists, all but banned from other Middle Eastern networks, are staples on al-Jazeera," he claims.

But Mamoun Fandy, a scholar and journalist who writes frequently for Al-Ahram in Cairo and London-based Asharq al-Aswat offers an astringent rebuttal [scroll down three postings to "Braintrust," July 25, 2004.]. He contends that al-Jazeera is hardly as unflinching as Moran suggests: it never questions its sponsor government, Qatar, or examines the brutalities of Saddam Hussein. Rather, "it is a mobilization media source focused on whipping up support for causes it deems important," he asserts. “Many Arab liberals and independent thinkers who do not bear allegiance to either Islamism or Arab nationalism have effectively been barred from the network's airwaves,” he claims, concluding that “al-Jazeera is not an objective news source, but rather a media arm and recruiting tool of al-Qaeda."

IN THEIR OWN WORDS (quotes, current or controversial):

Kosovo Shows “Importing Democracy is Not Easy”
Iraq is not the only place where the West's attempts to cultivate democracy have encountered high hurdles. Western powers have been working since June 1999 to democratize Kosovo. “If it took the United States, with U.N. assistance, just a few weeks to put together Iraq's interim government,” says Claude Salhani, “the slower-working U.N. and its European Union partner working to democratize Kosovo have now been at it for five years.”

Saudi-funded efforts to spread conservative Islam to Kosovo have failed. “Islamist groups who had invested funds in building mosques and schools have withdrawn, except for one involved in health care,” he notes. But, as in Iraq, “the concept of democracy has been largely absent”.

The US should have drawn lessons from Kosovo for its intervention in Iraq. The country “offers a prime example of ethnic divides and tensions, of a crisis that could erupt into a conflict at a moment's notice and of the difficulties involved in introducing coherent democracy in such an environment.”

Need to Counter Skeptics on Democracy Promotion
America must not give up on promoting democracy, says Moses Naim, editor of Foreign Policy magazine, writing in the August 4 edition of the Financial Times (registration required). “Lurid news stories about warlordism in Afghanistan and bloodshed in Iraq give a daily boost to misgivings about exporting democracy,” he notes. Such developments have prompted a “new pessimism about the Middle East” and “growing scepticism about promoting democracy abroad.”

”Stability and security have become an American obsession,” Naim observes, lamenting the fact that “US politicians increasingly see the promotion of democracy abroad as a threat to both of these goals, with the result that it is becoming a cause with a dwindling constituency.” With the Iraq war diminishing this support further, he suggests it is “a sad irony that the political will to promote democracy abroad is a casualty of a war that, many of its promoters said, was waged in democracy's name.”

America "Was the First European Union" – Timothy Garton Ash,
There should be no "either/or" about Europe and America, because the answer is "both." The interests of the two are very similar, he says, and so are their fundamental beliefs. Most Americans are not cowboys, and most Europeans are not wimps. America, because of the way its politics and its ethnic mixture developed, "was the first European Union." Because of the rise of China and India, Europe and America may be facing "our last chance to set the agenda of world politics," and we should do so in favour of freedom.

Joschka Fischer on the US
I never use the concept, `multipolar.' I use `multilateral.' Because in the existing reality, we have only one global power: whether you like it or not, this is the United States… I don't believe, in the 21st century, in the balance of power system. This is a European idea of the 19th and 20th centuries.

From my point of view, we shouldn't discuss the world of tomorrow in terms of becoming a balance to the United States… The United States is our most important ally. They helped us many times. Without the United States, the unification or German democratisation after the Nazi period would have been much more complicated, or almost impossible. They defended us during the Cold War... .

Victor Davis Hanson on Europe
[T]he well-meaning, but entirely impotent European efforts at curbing genocide in the Sudan or the nuclearization of Iran make one doubt the vaunted new efficacy of "soft power" -- triangulation always predicated on the threat of real American hard force in the shadows.

SUMMER BREAK
This issue of Democracy Digest will be our last until early September. But please do send us items concerning issues, events and opportunities that will be of interest to supporters of democracy in the transatlantic community, and to our growing readership around the world.