Iraq Elections tip of the Iceberg?

Recent elections in Lebanon, Egypt, even local polls in Saudi Arabia are evidence beyond the glaringly obvious success today in Iraq that the ancient Ummat il-Arabiya is being deeply stirred by President Bush’s fortuitous and accidental conversion to democratic nation-building due to his miscalculations in Iraq.

To see Joe Biden doing salaams to today’s events in Iraq demonstrates that at least one skillful political weathervane is hedging his bets. I’ll bet Reid, Pelosi, Dean, and perhaps Murtha are biting their tongues over the rapid and unexpected Sunni rush to the ballot boxes. What if Bush pulls it off?

Fouad Ajami notes recently after a trip to the region that “the Middle East is Bush Country.” The infrastructure of civil society in the various Middle East autocracies is based on a military model, with little or no room for independent activity. Even economic transactions bear the crushing weight of mindless bureaucratic inertia. But the subjects of these bureaucratic houses of cards are yearning to become citizens of a westernized polity, Ajami believes.

Or are they?

I believe they are, but I also suspect that free democratic elections in many countries may turn out to be a one-time event, bringing a religious party to power whose main plank becomes adhesion to the sharia.

The sharia does not support opposing parties, or even a secular view of the world.

As a political officer in Saudi Arabia, I recall the overwhelming conservatism of the ruling elites, all the more crushing because the Saudi townsfolk and the Bedu were even more conservative than the unelected officials comprising the government.

In Saudi Arabia, for instance, when they inaugurated female education in the fifties, Minister of Education Prince Fahd bin Abd al-Aziz and his deputy Prince Sultan had to paint over the windows of school buses carrying girls to school, lest the parents stone the buses!

In Saudi, some speculate that Osama bin Laden might win a country-wide election were he allowed on the ballot!

However, not every state in the region has inhabitants as hidebound as the Kingdom. The problem in Saudi Arabia is perhaps country-specific, as the ruling Royals allowed the Ulema to control lower education in a decision in the seventies which allowed the Royal Family a free hand in other areas, but produced a generation of pious faineants.

Egypt may be the most enigmatic contender for democracy among all Arab countries, with a sophisticated religious party, the Ikhwan, or Muslim Brotherhood, prevented from attaining real representation by a repressive military and police apparatus. The intelligence police are so numerous in Cairo that they employ ten thousand automobiles, which they wanted to propel by Amoco natural gas in a large fleet conversion while I worked at Amoco. And that was a decade ago, so you can bet that more cars and mukhabarraat are patrolling the Cairo streets.

The recent police brutality at polling places in Cairo marred the earlier relatively fair stages of selecting a parliament. Mubarak’s goons are always at the ready and behind them looms the all-powerful [against its own people] Egyptian military establishment.

With even the BBC hailing the Iraq elections [as well as Air America?!?], it appears that the yay-sayers and beleaguered George Bush will have a few weeks surcease from the nanny-press.

And maybe even another bump in the polls?

But the Middle East is an elephant’s graveyard of hopes and aspirations, and even the celebrating Iraqi voters today are calling for strong leadership, which often translates rapidly into a strongman.

Let’s put Saddam away for good, at least in Iraq.