Warum sind die Neokonservativen gescheitert?

Daran, dass die naiverweise die kulturellen Eigentümlichkeiten des Nahen Ostens nicht wahrhaben wollten, behauptet der ihnen oft fälschlich zugerechnete Martin Kramer:

And there’s the rub. There is a growing suspicion that maybe the problem isn’t us, it’s them—it is some complex interaction of culture, history, and economy that is the obstacle to a successful democratic transformation.

I say “suspicion” deliberately. The idea of an Arab exception has always been anathema on the left and in Middle Eastern studies, for obvious reasons. But it has been anathema on the right as well. President Bush (following Ronald Reagan) has attacked “cultural condescension,” and no one wants to be guilty of that. So we have to keep our suspicions to ourselves.

Daraaus folgt für ihn aber nicht, dass es gilt mit Tyrannen zu kungeln. Nur müsse eine auf Demokratisierung abzielende Politik das Selbstverständnis der Menschen im Nahen Osten in ihr Kalkül einbeziehen:

The only exit from our own self-centered chauvinism is to begin to think systematically about the way the Arab world is different, and then to formulate a true Plan B—a plan not fixated on elections, or even on democracy, but on the kind of freedoms whose suppression has been most resented in the region. Those freedoms are not the ones we necessarily value. They are collective, not individual; and they revolve around identity, not interests. There is a yearning for freedom—of a kind I call freedom of identity.
Take Iraq, for example. Saddam suppressed the classic individual freedoms: speech, assembly, association. There wasn’t and still isn’t any constituency prepared to fight for any of them. But people rebelled time and again when he denied their freedom of identity: Kurds did it, Shiites did it, tribes did it. They were prepared to fight for a kind of freedom.
… This is hardly a liberal longing—you can yearn for this freedom and still sanction honor killing. But this is the hand we have been dealt, and our reluctance to play the cards is hurting us.

Zur Katastrophe geworden sie die Irakpolitik, weil sie entgegen dieser Einsicht, am Bestreben festhielt, den Einheitsstaat zu retten.

… The most oppressive Middle Eastern states have been large, diverse ones, ruled by minorities in the name of a big ideology. By nature, these regimes will be authoritarian, even despotic. Compact entities with secure majorities are more likely to democratize, and to accord full political rights to minorities.

Israel is such a democracy: it has extended full political and linguistic rights to its Arab minority precisely because its Jewish majority is secure. Iraqi Kurdistan may be on the same path. It is often said that the breakup of Iraq would mean ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. But minority enclaves probably have a better chance of surviving where majorities feel themselves reasonably secure and enjoy explicit recognition of their political status. We might have done better to promote this sort of freedom in Iraq from the outset.

Tags: Arabische Welt, Bush, Demokratie, Irak, Israel, Kurden, Martin Kramer, Neokonservative, Schiiten

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 7th, 2006 at 19:12 and is filed under Irak, Neoirrationalismus, USA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.