The US Will Have To Allow Islamic Democracy In Its Project For A New Middle East.

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NICOSIA - As regimes and opposition movements in the Middle East realise that the US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan marks the start of an American project to re-order the region, in Washington there is a growing recognition that any democracy in the area would have to have an Islamic character. APS sources say the experience in Iraq so far, as well as the general trend with democratic experiments in much of the Middle East, has been that efforts to impose a Western-style democracy result in the process itself being short-circuited by Islamic tendencies that have no stake in such a system.

US strategists are starting to conclude that the best option for a new Middle East would be to strengthen the institutional power base of moderate Islamic groups by opening up the possibility for them to invest politically in the democratic system. The system should embrace pluralism as has been the experience in Lebanon.

Such a system will allow these groups enough room to Islamise democracy in the Middle East to the extent that it remains true to the region's cultural heritage, while retaining the fundamental civic and social freedoms - i.e. involving a compromise negotiated internally.

Currently, moderate Islamists in much of the Middle East are caught in a political limbo between radicals and pro-regime groups and have a limited role on the political scene. They are seen either as apologists for the regime, or as a softer front for radical tendencies.

Experts cite the Iranian model as one example which should be encouraged rather than challenged, as Washington has implicitly threatened to do by bracketing the country in President George W. Bush's "axis of evil". Since the death of the Imam Khomeini in 1989, the Islamic revolution in Iran has seen a trend towards moderation rather than towards extremism.

The aggressive export of Iran's radical Shiism declined after Hojatulislam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani became president in 1989, and the questioning of various internal policies began to intensify along with a popular sentiment in favour of reform. This resulted in the election of President Mohammed Khatami in 1997 by a big majority of Iranians, mainly the young and women.

The majority of Iranian public opinion now favours a more reformist approach than Khatami is prepared to contemplate - implying that, left to itself, Iran will evolve into a liberal democracy with an Islamic character. It would be a durable democracy, based on a structure created by the Iranians over time and through trial and error, rather than on a model imposed by the West.

There is also the Turkish model of an Islamic democracy. This is being spearheaded by a moderate Islamist government.

Writing in the International Herald Tribune of July 28, 2003, Reza Aslan, a visiting professor at the University of Iowa, observes that academics and reformist theologians in Iran have been trying over the past two decades to "redefine traditional Islamic political philosophy in order to bring it in line with modern concepts of representative government". What these Iranians have been working towards is "Islamic democracy": that is, a liberal democratic society founded on an Islamic moral framework. This is not a theocracy; it is religious democracy. The Jewish version of this ideal currently exists in Israel. Indeed, it could be argued that the United States itself began as a religious democracy founded on a Protestant moral framework.

However, it appears unlikely at present that the Bush administration would be prepared to accept the Iranian model for Iraq, let alone in other countries of the Middle East - unless there are clear changes in the political as well as strategic orientations of Tehran's hardliners. The official line from the US is that it does not envisage a military confrontation with Iran, but rather that it would encourage democratic and reformist forces among the general public to topple the current regime.

Yet the APS sources have little doubt that the US would go to war, if necessary, to prevent Iran from achieving a nuclear strike capability. Also there is no doubt that the Iranian regime, to ensure its survival, will do whatever it takes to develop this capability.

The Iranian population is overwhelmingly Shiite, and so its democratic model may not be applicable to Iraq, where the Sunni and Shiite sects are more evenly distributed within the population as most of Iraq's Kurds are Sunni as well. Iraq should have its own model based on pluralism as the country also has Turkoman and Christian minorities.

The Bush administration, including neo-conservatives within it, has shown that it is prepared to accept Shiite theologians at the top leadership levels in Iraq, provided they do not express violently anti-American views. The Jewish scholar originally chosen by the Bush administration to draft a constitution for Iraq, Noah Feldman, has argued that the notion that Islam is incompatible with democracy is false. His debut book, "After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy", argues that there is a tremendous appetite for democratic reform throughout the Middle East and the US can play a leading role in encouraging Muslims to pressure their governments to hand over power.

Feldman points out that "the costs of sticking with the autocrats are great... Continuing this policy will array the United States and the West against the interests of ordinary Muslims, who will be unlikely to forget what they see as a betrayal of the values of freedoms and self-government that the US and the West represent to them". But he also notes that democracies need strong civil organisations to survive, and in much of the Muslim world, the Islamists are the ones who have built such grassroots organisations.

As such, they will undoubtedly come to power in many countries, and there is no guarantee that they will seek closer ties with the West. In a July 23, 2003 online discussion in a Washington Post forum about his new book, Feldman pointed out that "It's natural for Iraqis and other Muslims and Arabs to be skeptical of a foreign presence in Iraq. The best and only way to reassure Iraqis of the coalition's intentions is by actually creating the conditions where Iraqis can design their own institutions and govern themselves". He also stated that: "Iraqis need democracy in a new Iraqi style, with rights and freedoms and equality that fit their own values. A handful of Iraqis may support theocracy, but the vast majority of Iraqis including committed, believing Muslims, reject the Iranian model. They have seen that the government in Iran has failed miserably".

In Turkey, where the governing Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power last November through the democratic process, there has not been a dramatic rift with the West. The AKP has shown itself to be as pragmatic, and as corrupt, as any of the secular political parties that governed the country in the past two decades. While Turkish-US relations are no longer as warm as they used to be, in view of the rift over Ankara's denial of permission to open a front from Turkish territory as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the situation is slowly improving. The US had blamed the Turkish military for not permitting a front to be opened into northern Iraq. Ankara is currently studying a US request for some 10,000 troops to act as a stabilisation force in Iraq. On Aug. 13, the navies of Israel, Turkey and the US will hold joint search-and-rescue exercises off Turkey's Mediterranean coast.

Turkey is a Sunni majority country with fairly large minority groups, including Kurds and Alevis, the latter being a breakaway branch of Shiism. Ironically, it is under the Islamist AKP that the parliament voted, on July 30, for the separatist Turkish Kurdish militants of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) to be given a partial and conditional amnesty. While critics note that the Turkish example may not be representative of the situation in the Arab world, it indicates that Islamist parties are not necessarily insensitive to ethnic and/or sectarian rights and would be prepared to make concessions to minorities, especially if there are political benefits associated with making such moves.

On July 30, the Turkish parliament curbed the powers of the military through a package of reforms which also included easing state restrictions on the right to demonstrate.