The Stakes

Michael Young -- opinion editor at the Daily Star in Beirut -- considers the consequences in Friday's WSJ:

[F]ailure [in Iraq] will, at the very least, push democracy to a far lower rung of regional priorities. This will be a boon to the security-minded Arab regimes that most feared a regional democratic transformation in the first place. And those of the Iraq war's critics who, legitimately, bemoaned Washington's coddling of Arab dictators (but then refused to endorse the exception to the rule in Iraq) may one day see this or a subsequent administration again prefer the steadiness of tyrants to the wishy-washiness of Arab societies that seem to hate the U.S. far more dependably than they do their own lack of liberty. . .

Arab societies, specifically liberals, failed to see the advantages in the removal of Saddam, regardless of their antipathy to the Bush administration. Here was an opportunity to cheer on the emergence of an Arab democracy, with deep implications for democracy at home, and it was missed. . . Yet other than from the Iraqis themselves, the argument was rarely heard in the Arab world; advantageous pragmatism was supplanted by stubborn attachment to principle--"principle" that, in yearning for American failure, ignored how Iraqis suffered from the ensuing carnage.

Saddam's fall was welcomed by shamefully few Arabs. . . Nor was there much interest regionally in the discovery of the Baath's mass graves. One reason was the secondary concern that many Arab societies have for Saddam's foremost victims--the Shiites and Kurds; but the main cause of indifference was that Saddam's crimes, if acknowledged, threatened to imply the Arabs' inability to responsibly manage their own emancipation.

In other words, applauding his ouster meant admitting that the Arab world could produce no better, and deserved no better than Western armies in its midst. This rationale was nonsense, but spawned a cliché that Arab intellectuals routinely peddle: that Arab reform must come "from within"--though the notion would have been laughable in Baathist Iraq. Arab societies must indeed open up from inside, but absent an echo, sometimes a determining one, from outside--including the option of foreign military action--little will change.

Read the whole thing.

(via Free Thoughts)