The Buggy Professor -- Daily reflections on politics and economics, unpedantic and free-wheeling, by a political scientist

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

Ottoman and Arab Developmental Failures and Ongoing Problems: Some Comparisons: 3rd of a 3-Article Series

Contrary to what the previous article initially claimed, this mini-series on the Turkish model of development --- its secular constitution, tolerance, and democratic institutions making the Turks resistant to bin Ladenism and other violent Islamist appeals that are widespread in the Arab world and in Pakistan --- hasn't drawn to an end with just two articles, a brief interlude in the wider series on the democratic prospects of the 22 Arab countries. Still fairly brief, that interlude continues with this, a third article dealing with the Turkish model. The chief reason? Simply this: the more the buggy professor went through some buzzing cogitations about that model --- particularly whether it could be emulated by Turkey’s Arab neighbors in the Middle East or in North Africa --- the more his adrenaline-pumping brain led him to delve more thoroughly into the historical causes of Ottoman backwardness, economic, technological, and military: above all, compared to its European great power rivals from the late 18th century on.

And also, as you’ll see in a moment, its overlap on these scores --- economic, technological, and military --- with the even greater backwardness of the 22 Arab countries . . . even though in the 8th through roughly the 11th centuries, to put this in rounder perspective, the Arab empire in the Middle East, North Africa, and Iberia was generally more advanced than Christian Europe at the time.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

Ottoman and Arab Imperial Decline: What's Similar?

Relative backwardness, at it happens, still marks Turkish economic and technological development almost a century after the collapse of the Ottoman empire by the end of WWI and the westernizing revolution from above that was then quickly initiated by Ataturk and his nationalist followers in the military and administrative classes. We’re talking, remember, about the 8 decade period from 1923 on, the start of the modern Turkish Republic: secular, western in orientation, and eventually after WWII with democratic aspirations that have been increasingly institutionalized. As it also happens --- the hook up with this third article in the interlude series --- the numerous, stretched-out causes of Ottoman backwardness turn out to have parallels with the earlier Arab empire from the 7th century until its long decline, starting in Spain and Portugal and southern Italy with the Christian re-conquests of those lands, then in the rigidifying of its cultural and philosophical life after the 11th century --- with, at most, a few standout exceptions --- and finally in its conquests by the Ottomans in the 16th century and then increasingly European colonial powers from the 1830s on. Those problems continue, almost a millennium later, to impede Arab industrialization, literacy, upward mobility, and technological advance. They also, as you’ll see in this and the next articles, continue to impede something else of central relevance: effective democratization anywhere in the Arab world..

Nothing insurmountable here, mind you. A swarm of obstacles and impediments all the same, regarding which there should be no illusions. They're something the next articles in the series on the democratic prospects of the Arab countries --- Iraq included --- will deal with explicitly, without hedging or evasion.

Our Present Aim

What follows in this third article is an effort to systematically capture and throw light on those causes of Ottoman backwardness, particularly where they have parallels with those that also explain Arab economic and technological backwardness . . . at any rate down toward roughly the middle of the 20th century.

Since then, of course, Turkish democratic development --- with lots of ups and downs --- has become institutionally stable and more liberal, with more manufacturing industry implanted in the country than is the case in any of the Arab countries. Of the non-oil rich Arab countries, remember, only Tunisia with its tiny population of 10 million matches Turkey’s living standard, the two countries each having a per capita income in purchasing power parity terms of around $7000. Turkey’s achievement, by contrast, stands out if you also remember that it has 70 million people: this, plus far more democratic development and far greater resistance to bin Laden-like fundamentalist intolerance and conspiratorial paranoia . . . part and parcel of the Arab street almost everywhere, though with a clear diminution the better the democratic prospects of the 22 Arab countries when you rank them on certain measures of such prospects.

We begin by reprinting a section of the previous article, Part Four. Consider it an indispensable link to the causal generalizations that follow, necessary background that, even if you’ve read it before, might be a useful jog to some mental reminders. Just for the heck of it, we’ll call the reprinted section Part One here (how’s that for jumbling things around?) That will allow us to signal the new causal analysis in a new section, Part Two.

Part One:
OTTOMAN DECLINE CLARIFIED

Ottoman and Arab Expansion Like Those of Other Empires, European or Otherwise

Historically, a point to grasp at the outset is that centuries of growing Ottoman power and expansion weren't a result of the Sultanate and Caliphate, just the opposite: the Sultan-Ruler and Islamic Caliphate were part-and-parcel of aggressive, Ottoman imperial expansion that included the conquest of a huge Christian and Arab empire by a highly militarized Asiatic people after they overran the remnants of the Byzantine Empire in the mid-15th century. (For a good brief historical survey, see this link. The Ottoman Sultans claimed to be the successors of both Caesar and the Prophet, a universal king for Muslims and all other subjects under Ottoman rule.) As with all long-lived empires, the Turkish conquerors were able to find collaborating local elites to serve as their privileged auxiliaries. They included elite military-administrative forces like Janissaries, Christian in origin, then reared as Muslims, or Mamelukes in Egypt and elsewhere in North Africa.

Posted by Michael Gordon @ 06:38 PM CST [continue] [ Comments? ]

Friday, May 14, 2004

TURKEY'S DEMOCRATIC ACHIEVEMENTS AND PROBLEMS: 2nd of a Two-Part Mini-Series

Why the split into two articles on Turkey? Well, simply this. As it turned out, the original article on Turkey and its achievements compared to the Arab countries --- especially its secular democracy, its pro-western orientation, its tolerance and immunity to bin Ladenism and radical Islamist appeals, even in the ranks of the moderate fundamentalist political party now in power --- ran on a long, long time . . . maybe, so the buggy prof would like to think, in a kind of gliding, half-graceful manner; but very long all the same, no? No, or rather yes; clearly it did . . . or so it seemed finally to the buggy mind after a flash or two of freewheeling insight when, with effort, the prof’s bug-eyed vision tried zipping across its vast length a moment or two ago and nearly got woozy in the process.

Much better then to cleave the argument into two, particularly since there was a natural break in the initial exposition near the mid-point. And since, too, come to think of it, the final few sections had just been expanded with a few added points. Some of these points sharpened the comparative analysis; others tossed in a few more nuggets of back-up evidence.

The outcome? The first article now sets out Turkey’s political and cultural differences with the Arab countries, a model that, we hope, might be emulated in time by some of the more promising Arab regimes --- the handful that consists of the small Gulf states, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria, and (we further hope) transitional Iraq.

What ensues in this second article is a natural follow-up.

As its initial task, the argument seeks to explain the long decline of the Ottoman empire, at first slow in the making --- the Ottomans an aggressive militarized people still expanding into the heart of Christian Europe as late as the end of the 17th century, only to begin losing the periphery of their empire in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, first in Europe and then in the Middle East starting with the Greek and Egyptian rebellions of the 1820. The decline --- a matter of growing military weakness, blatant industrial backwardness, and incompetent rule in a tradition-laden society tenaciously resistant to modernizing influences --- then picked up rapid momentum in the last decades of the latter century: by then, all the European countries under Ottoman control had rebelled successfully, and later, in WWI, the Arab peoples in the Middle East followed suit. Nor was that the end of decline. Things got worse for the Ottomans. Two years after WWI ended, the Greeks invaded Turkish homeland territory and sought to annex land west of the Dardanelles. All the initial battles were won by the Greeks. As the Greek forces pounded ahead, everywhere in Turkey a sense of raw teeth-clenching crisis and desperation rippled the population.

The moral is clear. Without that long decline and its breakneck pace at the end --- the Turkish homeland itself menaced with big territorial losses --- no swift, high-potent effort by newly energized nationalist leaders to break clean with the Ottoman past would have materialized.

A second task intrudes at this point: to analyze Turkey's revolution from above.

Essentially, in those urgent circumstances after WWI, a section of the military under Ataturk seized power in a coup; immediately deposed the age-old Sultanate-Caliphate form of rule that had dominated Ottoman life for almost four centuries; and --- more important still --- initiated a modernizing revolution from the right that is still unfolding, with ups and down in vigor and success, a good eight decades later. Something else too. In many ways, as the argument will show, Turkey's revolution from above carried out by farsighted military elites paralleled the similar modernizing struggles initiated in Germany and Japan in the 1870s by likeminded military elites. Illuminating the nature of that revolution in Turkey, not least by comparing it with the German and Japanese cases of analagous force-fed modernization from the right --- including their far different outcomes by WWII --- completes the second task.

A third and final task then rears up. No surprise, it’s to probe the multi-sided legacy of the Ataturk revolution and its subsequent influence in Turkish life --- political, economic, and cultural --- on Turkish achievements and problems.

Overall, regard the new duo of articles on Turkish politics and development --- in comparison with others, the Germans and the Japanese, and more recently the Arabs --- as a mini-interlude within the wider series, weeks in the making now, on the democratic prospects of the 22 Arab countries. The next article in that wider series will seek, among other things, to see whether that Turkish model is applicable to the more promising Arab countries. Note that the second article retains the same division of the original article into distinct parts and sub-sections. In particular, it resumes the overall argument where it left off at the end of Part Three.

Part Four:
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE’S DECLINE CLARIFIED: THE PRE-REQUISITE OF ITS WESTERNIZING
REVOLUTION FROM ABOVE IN THE ATATURK ERA

The Key Point Underscored

Note the pivotal part of the analysis just unfolded here: the crucial background of non-stop decline of a once major great power and empire. Without 150 to 200 years of such endless decline --- spaced out initially and then picking up precipitous speed from the 1870s on --- the Turkish elites would never have had an incentive to undertake the liberalizing westernization of their country under military leadership. Why would they have risked sweeping changes in the status quo that would otherwise jeopardize their power, prestige, and rentier-like sources of wealth?

To grasp the magnitude of the changes in Turkish life that the decline generated, recall that the Ottoman Turks had been Muslim for a millennium by the time Ataturk's revolution was under way in the early 1920s . . . itself built upon earlier changes, from 1908, initiated by newly emerged nationalists known as Young Turks. From the late 15th century on, following their conquest of the decrepit Byzantine Empire, Constantinople became the home of the Caliphate for the Muslim world, including Ottoman rule --- direct or indirect --- over the various Arab peoples that soon followed. It was only in the 1920s, to clarify, that Ataturk abolished the Sultan's rule and his Caliphate status --- his role as the religious or spiritual head of Islam and a legitimizing source of political power in the Ottoman empire --- and solidified the break with Turkey's Islamic past.

The Causes of the Ottoman Decline

The Ottoman Empire's prolonged decline and then quick collapse and disappearance after WWI has to be understood both in historical and comparative terms.

Comparisons with what? Tersely put, with other "revolutions carried out from above" by right-wing military and administrative elites, mainly as a way to foster national power and influence in order to close the gap with the far more powerful, more modern western democracies. Several countries have sought to modernize this way, without succeeding. Those that did --- our comparative focus --- were Japan and Germany from 1870 on. As for the western democracies that were far more advanced and seen as threats by the Japanese, Germans, and Turks, we're talking about France, Britain, and the USA. Obviously.

Posted by Michael Gordon @ 06:07 PM CST [continue] [ Comments? ]

Saturday, May 8, 2004

THE DEMOCRATIC PROSPECTS OF THE ARAB WORLD: THE TURKISH MODEL AND CONTRAST. A 2-Part Mini-Series

This is the 8th article in the series on the democratic prospects of the Arab countries, at a time American foreign policy in the Bush era is actively seeking to promote liberalizing reforms in all 22 of them . . . the ultimate aim to try nudging them in a solid democratic direction.

That aim is a central part of the wider war on terrorism, an ideological struggle unfolding everywhere in the Muslim world between modernizers and fundamentalist forces of various sorts. Not all the modernizers are democratic, though most probably are to one degree or another. One thing for sure, scarcely any of the fundamentalist movements are democratic in any meaningful way, the line between so-called moderate and radical Islamists very fuzzy at best . . . save in Turkey, a point we’ll return to in a few seconds. As for the masses of Arab populations --- what can we say about them? Where do they stand in this ideological tug-of-war?

Well, in the absence of ongoing systematic survey data in their despotic countries --- a big drawback for scholarly work --- the best we can do is speculate. Most likely, the Arab populations are largely concerned with jobs, income, and law-and-order, plus better social services, and will support any government that helps provide them adequately . . . any whatever its political nature.

Back to Islamist fundamentalists.

With a tiny handful of exceptions --- Turkey the stand-out here --- they and their mass followers and sympathizers actively support Islamist terrorism, including bin Ladenism. That claim isn't speculative. As we'll see in a moment or two, a 2004 Pew Global Attitudes survey provides hard evidence here. Simultaneously, though, the fundamentalist leaders and spokesmen in each of the Arab dictatorships have to be wary of actively promoting any challenge, direct or indirect, to the existing despotic governments themselves. Any such challenge will be ruthlessly quashed by the secret police and other security forces: witness Syria in the 1980s or Egypt and Algeria in the 1990s or Yemen now. Even the more moderate Arab dictators have sought to repress any challenge from home-grown fundamentalist movements . . . all of which, with little variation across the 22 Arab countries, are inspired by some notion of purified Islamist revenge for hundreds of years of Arab decline and humiliation, the root causes of which are always imagined, in paranoid conspiratorial fashion, to lie with foreign devils --- Jews, Israel, and the US above all, plus their dictatorial lackeys within the Arab world itself.

Part One:
THE CURRENT ARTICLE'S FOCUS AND HOW IT LINKS TO THE PREVIOUS ARGUMENT IN THE SERIES

In the previous two buggy articles, the democratic prospects of the 22 Arab countries were set out and evaluated at length. A small handful --- Algeria, Morocco, Jordan, and the tiny Gulf states --- were found to be more promising on this score. In turn, remember, democracy tends to reduce radical fundamentalist appeals. That, to repeat, isn't feckless speculation. Here are the results found in the tantalizing Pew Global Attitudes Survey for 2004.

As you can see, 65% of the people in Pakistan, a struggling country whose leaders are seeking to become more democratic after years of military rule and ethnic conflicts, admire bin Laden. In Jordan, one of the better situated Arab countries as far as democratic prospects go, the figure drops to 55%, still alarming enough; in Morocco, more advanced in its prospects still, it declines to 45%. By the time you reach the much more solidly democratic Turkish Republic, public support plunges to around 7% . . . scarcely higher than the equivalent figures in West Europe. Yet Turkey, recall --- though by far the most promising Islamic electoral democracy in the Middle East, and one of only two or three others (Mali, Senegal, and Indonesia) --- isn't even ranked as a totally free country in Freedom House's annual surveys, generally regarded as the best comparative source for ranking countries across 14 categories --- grouped more generally into three broader classes (free, partly free, not free).

Freedom House's ranking of Turkey, note immediately, is actually encouraging. In effect, it seems to suggest that an Islamic country need not even be a fully free, liberal democracy for the appeal of bin Ladenism to be heavily blunted, even shattered.

All of which prompts a key question, the overarching theme of this article: what explains Turkey’s democratic success in fostering democratic development and a clear pro-Western orientation that immunizes its population against radical Islamist fundamentalism?

Part Two:
WHY IS TURKEY SUCH A PROMISING DEMOCRATIC PROSPECT AND
A PRO-WESTERN MEMBER OF NATO?

Turkish Achievements

Turkey --- with 68 million in population (about the size of the largest Arab country, Egypt) and a per capita income of around $7300, roughly two to three times the equivalent for the non-oil rich Arab countries --- has been undergoing a modernizing revolution with ups and downs, including democratic development, under military auspices for almost a century now. Even now, more than 8 decades after the revolution began, the military remains a dominant force in Turkish politics. In this respect, it’s not much different from Arab countries. What is different is that the military officer corps is the embodiment of the modernizing revolution, with a strong emphasis on secularism and a pro-western orientation. It has implanted Turkey inside NATO; seeks to enter the EU; and has a military alliance with Israel in all but name. More to the point, it has also shown a much greater willingness than the Arab militaries --- whoever the despot is (a king or a president-for-life) --- to foster democratic development as well.

Off and on, to be more precise, the country has experienced a growing trend of increasingly free elections in the last two decades, and --- a sign of clear progress --- a moderate fundamentalist party won the last parliamentary election in 2002 and now dominates a government that respects fully the secular Constitution of the country. This is a notable achievement. There are other achievements too.

In particular, its current leaders --- the heads of the military behind the scenes and the elected government headed by a moderate fundamentalist party (ATP) and its leader as Prime Minister, Recep Tayip Erdogan and his ATP party in parliament --- studiously avoid what Arab fundamentalist movements constantly drum up support for. Concretely put, Turkish leaders of all sorts . . .

Shy away from any demands to apply the Shari, Islamic law, in the country.

Eschew the conspiratorial paranoid fantasies that flourish in the Arab world about Arab despotism (the fault of others), economic and technological backwardness (ditto), and declining power and influence for generations now . . . likewise the fault of others, especially Jews, Israel, the US, and its western lackeys that follow it.

Renounce any demonization of Israel, an Arab obsession in the popular media everywhere and on the Arab street. On the contrary, Turkey has close military ties with Israel and draws repeatedly on Israeli expertise for its technological and economic development.

And, finally, avoid any anti-Semitism . . . now a flourishing part of the Arab street almost everywhere, purveyed in virulent, Nazi-like racist ways. Not only does Turkey maintain a semi-military alliance with Israel, there is scarcely any observable animosity toward Jews in public or private life. When, for instance, a synagogue was bombed last year by Islamist terrorists, the lead politicians of the country --- together with the leading Muslim clerics --- all spoke on the same public platform with the chief rabbi of Turkey’s tiny Jewish population (about one-fifth of 1.0% of the 68 million Turks) and, without exception, denounced the barbarous attack on a co-religious place of worship.

Vivid Differences with the Arabs Here

The contrasts on these scores with the Arab countries, even the more moderate and politically promising, are graphic, a cause for reflection.

Consider, to take just one example --- a very recent one --- the latest garbled, crazy-house outburst that blames the recent terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia on Jews [click here for MEMRI]. Its demagogic ranter? Believe it or not, none other than Prince Abdullah, the Crown Prince himself . . . widely regarded as the head of the modernizing camp in that Mafioso clan of utterly corrupt, gangster-rulers who control the country and have lavishly used oil-money to spread the hateful racism and other extremism paranoia of Wahhabi Islam around the world.

Posted by Michael Gordon @ 06:51 PM CST [continue] [ Comments? ]

Friday, May 7, 2004

THE DEMOCRATIC PROSPECTS OF THE ARAB WORLD: 7th of an 9-Article Series

This, the 7th article in our series on the new Bush initiative to promote democratic changes in the Arab world --- all 22 Arab countries at the start of 2003 despotic and ultimately dependent on the secret police for their survival, but with differing prospects for democratic development --- almost completes the series, focusing mainly on the overall democratic prospects of the 22 Arab countries. It’s not new, this focus. At the end of the 6th article --- which ranked the Arab despotisms according to their democratic prospects --- the argument about their political future was left hanging fire. We still want to predict whether those better-situated Arab countries --- five or six, remember, with the most promising prospects --- will evolve into more solid electoral democracies in the near future.

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

Two-thirds of those promising countries are, it’s true, pretty tiny: the small Gulf states and Jordan, the latter about 5 million in population. Even so, two of them --- Morocco and Algeria --- are the third and fourth largest of the 22 Arab countries: Egypt tops the slate with about 75 million people, followed by Sudan’s 38 million, with Morocco and Algeria next in line. . . each around 32 million in population. The fate of Iraq --- with 25 million people the fifth largest of the 22 Arab countries --- is still shrouded by lots of uncertainty. For its worth, though --- as the 8th and final article in the series will show --- the buggy professor continues to believe that a transitional government, under UN auspices, will emerge on July 1st this year and prepare the country effectively for its first universal elections next January.

That belief, you might note, is in line with the views just vented in an interview by Bernard Lewis, the greatest scholar of Islam and the Middle East since World War II . . . a professor emeritus at Princeton now in his 80s:

Are you optimistic about the state of things there?

I'm cautiously optimistic about what's happening in Iraq. What bothers me is what's happening here in the United States.

Do you mean the controversy over the occupation? The pressure to pull out?

Yes, because the message that this is sending to people in that region is that the Americans are frightened, they want to get out. They'll abandon us the same as they did in '91. And you know what happened in '91.

Enough, however, about Iraq for the time being. It will be the center-stage focus of our 9th and last article in the series. For the time being, keep your attention riveted on the other Arab countries, 21 in number. (The 8th article, in case you are wondering, will probe Turkey's democratic development at length, explaining why it's not likely to be easily emulated by the Arab countries themselves.)

Part Two:
RIGHT NOW, THERE ARE NO ARAB ELECTORAL DEMOCRACIES

No, Not Unequivocally . . . Something Unique to the Arab Region of the World

Maybe so, but what about Algeria . . . discussed at length in the previous buggy article? Didn't it just experience an election for the presidency, monitored by 150 international observers, that was widely deemed as the freest and fairest ever held in the Arab world? Wasn't that election doubly impressive, considering that it was initiated and overseen by a government that had just completed a nasty, decade-long conflict, full of gore on both sides, to destroy Islamist terrorism on its soil?

The answer is yes, it is impressive. Still, commendable as the democratic opening has been, it doesn't make Algeria an electoral democracy; not fully. Suppose, to explain the point, that one of the opposition candidates had won the recent election. What then?

Well, most likely, the actual nature of power and rule in the country wouldn't have been noticeably altered. Since 1962, the year Algeria gained its independence from France, political and economic power in Algeria has been concentrated in a small coalition of dominant military and administrative elites, including the managers in charge of the oil and gas industries. Had President Abdelaziz Bouteflika lost the campaign for re-election, the winning candidate would still have had to come to terms with this entrenched elite and appointed a Prime Minister and Cabinet more or less identical to the existing one. At most, a handful of ministers might have different names. A little shuffling of the major members of the ruling coalition and clientele networks would also have ensued, including of course the new president himself --- just as, in the past, the dominant elite had violently eliminated or jailed a top-guy or two who looked like aggrandizing too much power at their expense, then closed ranks against all others. In short, whoever was president, power would still be heavily lodged in the hands of a dominant, largely unchanged cabal of elites.

To note this is not to denigrate the milestone nature of the recent political changes in Algeria, themselves genuinely encouraging. It is to show a certain hardheaded realism about the nature of how power is concentrated in Algeria, ruled by an overwhelmingly powerful coalition. Over time, of course, that coalition might broaden. It could open up to opposition politicians, including --- if they can be clearly identified --- moderate Islamist leaders who fully renounce terrorism and their endeavors to institute the Shari, Islamic law.

The Promising Arab Handful Classified

Where to place Algeria then in our buggy table that divides the countries of the world into solid liberal democracies, electoral democracies, hard and soft authoritarianisms, and quasi- and hard-line totalitarianism?

Posted by Michael Gordon @ 07:20 PM CST [continue] [ Comments? ]

Friday, April 30, 2004

Final. ARAB COUNTRIES RANKED BY THEIR DEMOCRATIC PROSPECTS: 6th in a 9 article series.

This is the 6th article in the series on the new shift in US foreign policy toward the Arab despots --- to pressure them in a variety of ways to liberalize and open up to democratic trends, the best way in the long run to combat radical Islamist fundamentalisms and their support for Islamo-fascist terrorism of the Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas sort. President Bush announced the new policy last fall, part of the wider ideological war on terrorism that was a major motive for toppling Saddamite Iraq; and he has subsequently criticized three traditional Arab allies of the US --- Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Tunisia --- for their authoritarian practices. As the previous article noted, some of the 22 Arab dictatorships have more encouraging democratic prospects than others --- roughly a handful of them. What follows in the commentary is lots of data singling out those more favorably situated countries, based on a variety of measures.

One More Article To Come

A 7th and an 8th article will deal directly with Iraq’s transforming prospects, much of which now hinge perilously on the ability of the US occupying forces to quell the existing terrorism and limited insurrection, either by the direct use of force or --- an encouraging sign in itself --- the use of local Iraqi forces as in Fallujah to take over at least a large share of responsibility for maintaining security. Will those Iraqi forces, led by a former Baathist general, do what the general and the local leaders in Fallujah promised to do: disarm the insurrectionists, isolate and turn over the terrorists, and maintain law and order?

Right now, nobody can say.

What is pretty clear by now --- a point we’ll hammer home in the 7th article --- is that there aren’t many Iraqis to develop a democratic Iraq: rather, religious and ethnic sects, plus tribal divisions within them: Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite. When we get around to clarifying this point, we’ll draw on what we’ve learned about democratic transformation from the successful military interventions of the US and its NATO allies in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s . . . another area of the world, it was said, incorrigibly prone to ethnic hatred and warfare, unable to evolve in democratic ways. The Austro-Hungarians had learned that; the Ottomans just as long --- or so we were told; and then so had Yugoslav’s leader, Milosevik and his demagogic government, after Marshall Tito’s death in the 1980s.

The doomsters, as it turned out, were wrong about the Balkans. They may be wrong too about Iraq and some of the other Arab countries.

Part One:
THE ECONOMIST’S RANKING OF DEMOCRATIC PROSPECTS

An unusually stimulating list of indices for ranking the Arab countries’ democratic prospects appeared last month in the admirable British weekly, The Economist. Its table is reproduced directly from that article, and all references should be strictly to it, not the buggy site.

Illuminating as The Economist’s measures are, note right off that they have a drawback: they don’t have some non-Arab control countries --- say, Bosnia in the former Yugoslavia or Bangladesh in South Asia or Indonesia in SE Asia, never mind Turkey in the Middle East itself --- as comparisons. The three latter countries are overwhelmingly Muslim, with tiny non-Muslim minorities; Bosnia is nearly 50% Muslim, with about 37% of the remaining population Serbs and 13% Croat. All four are electoral democracies; at least one of them, Turkey, is clearly near the fuzzy borderline between electoral democracies and more solid liberal ones. It’s a strange, regrettable drawback.

What to do about it?

Fortunately, we can offset it to an extent . . . even though there's no direct way for the buggy prof to parallel the kinds of rankings that The Economist uses. No surprise. That admirable weekly isn’t a scholarly journal that sets out explicitly its methodologies. Even so, there are other sources that more or less parallel The Economist rankings that we can draw on to compare the prospects of the Arab countries with those of the four Muslim electoral democracies just mentioned.

So, here for what it's worth --- transposing the rankings of the four countries just mentioned in terms that approximate, let us hope, The Economist's measures --- are how they would compare with the table above.

Untitled Document

Country	Political Rights	Press Freedom	Rule of Law (Corruption)	Religious Freedom	Women's Rights	Economic Openness	Total
Turkey	6	6	3	9	8	8	40
Indonesia	6	3	2	8	9	8	36
Bosnia	4	1	3	9	8	7	32
Bangladesh	4	4	3	7	4	5	28

First off, both tables here are going to involve guesswork, the buggy prof's probably even more so . . . especially with the need, given The Economist's scale from 1-10, to transpose Freedom House's and World Audit's measures. They rank countries democratic performance on an inverted scale of 1-10, with 1 the best score and 10 the worst. You'll notice that in the next section of this commentary, where Freedom House's overall ranking for 120 countries is set out. Meanwhile, if it helps to make sense of the two tables, consider that the top 20-25 industrial democracies in West Europe and the English-speaking world would each have a total score, on all six categories, somewhere in the high 50's or 60's.

Second, even without guesswork of this sort, the numerical scores in each category and the totals for the countries should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Despite the numerical measures from 1-10, these are what we call ordinal --- or ranked --- data. They are not strictly quantitative (interval) data. Meaning?

Well, this: if you look at the category for press freedom in The Economist's table, Morocco is given a score of "6" and Jordan "3". That does not mean that Morocco's press freedom is twice that of Jordan's. The fact is, we just don't know; all we can say is that a score of 6 is better than 5, 5 better than 4, 4 better than 3, and so on. If, to clarify further, one country scored a perfect "10" for press freedom --- say, Denmark if the measures were applied to them --- we couldn't say that the press was 10 times freer in Denmark than in Libya with its "1". It could be twice as great in freedom than Libya's --- with, say, a score "6" for Morocco 30% better than Libya's 1 --- or it could be a 100 times greater. There is just no way to be sure here.

This brief commentary has been prodded by a good article by Dominique Moisi in the International Herald Tribune on the EU's problems and prospects at a time when the Union has chug-a-chugged, struggling all the way, kilometer after kilometer, to a critical juncture in its history: in two days, 10 new East European states will be joining it . . . almost all former Communist countries, with three of them part of the Soviet imperial state. Almost all of these countries, you should note --- Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, the tiny three Baltic states, Bulgaria, Rumania, Slovakia, and Slovenia --- are already in NATO, their post-Communist, post-Soviet independence now secured by that alliance.

For the EU, the expansion should be a time of celebration everywhere in Europe. It ends the division of the Continent that emerged after WWI with the Communist triumph in the Soviet Union, then its imperial expansion eastward, then --- after WWII --- its hold over all of East and Central Europe save in Yugoslavia and Albania to the boundary between East and West Europe. It also marks the definitive triumph of democratic development and market-oriented economies. Alas, the existing West European members of the EU are anything but jubilant right now, hardly in a mood to celebrate the historic moment . . . or, come to think of it, anything at all. Such is the gloomy mood that prevails all around the EU. Even the title of the IHT article, "Europe Comes Together in Fear and Trepidation" captures pretty faithfully that widespread gloom and pessimism. [For the stats on public opinion, see the Euobarometer Report for Autumn, 2003, in this buggy article.]

For that matter, even the new East European members aren't certain what kind of European Union they're joining, what with all its huge problems set out below. Those of you who have followed the several buggy articles on the EU's economic and political problems and prospects --- especially back in the late fall last year and into January this year --- will note how the following commentary, plus the link to article in question, are in line with the lengthy arguments set out in those earlier buggy pieces.

Dominique Moisi, the author of the IHT article, will be well known to most of you: above all the students in ps 129 last quarter (the war on terrorism), where we read an article or two of his about EU-US relations. A Harvard-trained Ph.D. in political science who heads a prestigious institute in Paris, he's always informative and thoughtful, bringing to bear a solid theoretical perspective on international relations that is rare for a French commentator . . . even a professor. He's best known for a book he wrote back in the late 1990s. Signed by him and the then French Foreign Minister in the left-wing government of Lionel Jospin, Hubert Vendrine, its argument coined the term “hyper-power” (hyper-puissance) to describe the US global position.

The earlier buggy articles on the increasingly divergent prospects between the US and almost all the EU countries --- whether economic, techological, diplomatic, or military: for that matter, overall national solidarity and societal vigor --- appeared, as we just noted, late last fall and into this winter. See, for instance, this link, and this one, and this one. In the latter article, there's a link to a summary of an official admission of the EU executive Commission that its highly touted goals at a summit meeting in Lisbon at the end of the 1990s --- namely, to make the EU the most vigorous and technological advanced economic region in the world --- are not going to be met.

For the last three years, the EU has been stagnating economically, and it's clear by now that with the exception of a handful of countries --- Britain with its pro-market orientation and four or five very tiny homogenous states in Scandinavia, plus perhaps Holland and Ireland --- these economic troubles aren't cyclical: they're structural, part-and-parcel of the failure to reform vigorously the overweening regulatory apparatus, high taxes, and a vast network of welfare that have helped erode entrepreneurial vigor, the work ethos, and a sense of personal responsibility among far too many Europeans, most of whom, it seems, are mainly excited about vacation time . . . the Germans especially. Studies show they work about 9-10 weeks less a year than Americans. Well, if that's what they want, fine. You pays your money and you gets your choice, no? The trouble is, German economic growth --- for that matter, growth anywhere in the EU outside Scandinavia and Britain --- has ground to a halt for three years now. Over the previous decade, German growth wasn't much better. If anything, it resembled Japanese stagnation.

Meanwhile, in Asia, billions of Chinese, Indians, and others are working frantically to raise their standards of living.

Hard to believe that those billions of toiling, increasingly educated Asians are upset that the leisure-loving Germans and other West Europeans live in countries whose governments --- faced with stagnant growth, declining work forces, and swarms of welfare and other social commitments --- seem to be going slowly broke . . . unable to meet all their commitments and increasingly worried, if they seek to deregulate their economies and reduce spending and taxes, about either rejection by the voters in the next election or social turmoil that includes spasms of uncoiled violence.

This is the fifth article in the ongoing series, started about three weeks ago --- interrupted now and then by some other buggy commentaries --- about the prospects of democracy in Iraq and the Arab world . . . particularly in the light of the new Bush administration's initiative to push for liberalizing changes in the Arab world. Announced with fanfare last autumn and just about to emerge through the bureaucratic pipeline into a clear doctrine to be presented at the G-8 Summit meeting in June, that new initiative sparked off this series . . . along with buggy comments then and in subsequent articles why democratic changes in the 22 Arab countries and elsewhere in Islam are in the US national interest. Remember here, the war on terrorism is only partly military. It is partly also a matter of intelligence, police work, and improved homeland security.

At bottom, though, it remains an ideological struggle to combat and isolate radical Islamist fundamentalists and their terrorist followers, by above all promoting change in the failed autocratic states: democratic, cultural, and economic. As it happens, the current article is now finished. As it also happens, a sixth and final article will be needed to deepen the analysis of Iraq's democratic prospects and those of other Arab countries.

The question just posed is pivotal to all our inquiries in this series on the new Bush initiative to promote liberalizing democratic changes in the Arab world --- some 22 countries, with a total of 300 million people.

As late as April 2003, all were autocratic and relied ultimately for their survival on the secret police. In strict political terms, they differed mainly in the extent to which the use of coercion was at the forefront of political and social life or, alternatively, was more latent and kept in the background. Not, as you’ll see, a trivial distinction. Those countries where dictatorial regimes relied less on force and had some underlying sources of popular support and legitimacy --- all of them monarchical, like the small Gulf States or Jordan or Morocco: all of them, come to that, carefully limiting Islamist intrusions into political life --- have also created a variety of better democratic prospects: a somewhat freer media, more broad-based political parties, better treatment of women. And though all the parliaments in these and the other Arab states remain fairly weak, little more than rubber-stamp institutions, they do differ in the extent to which criticisms of the government can be voiced.

To use the terminology that was set out in the table on different kinds of political systems --- democratic and non-democratic --- the more promising Arab depotisms are soft authoritarian in nature as opposed to hard-line ones like Saudi Arabia or Syria or the Sudan or totalitarian like Baathist Iraq under Saddam. That table, you'll eventually see, is found later in this article, used to illustrate some points once more. More to the point, in the next and final article in the series, a variety of quantitative indices will rank the Arab countries in their democratic prospects: developments like the level of literary, GDP, magnitude of corruption, freedom of the media etc.

Interestingly, as you’ll also see, these more promising Arab states --- only a handful --- have been recently joined by Algeria . . . especially as the brutal civil war with fanatical Islamist terrorists, a decade long, has wound down and relatively free elections were just held for the presidency. Since last April, post-Saddamite Iraq --- for all the recent spate of violence, essentially centered in the Fallujah area (plus the wider Sunni triangle) and Moqtada Sadr’s radical Shia group in Najaf (at most, a few hundred gunmen as supporters) --- seems to have joined this promising group as well. If the current violent challenges there are suppressed, then --- what with all the other encouraging changes under way in Iraq --- there’s a good chance that a consensual Iraqi political system with liberalizing promise will be elected in popular elections next January.

We’ll return to all their democratic prospects, Iraq’s included --- setting out some rankings on a variety of indices that amount to democratic pre-requisites --- in a minute or two. For the time being, fix your attention on the Arab exception, globally speaking, and the implications for the war on terrorism.

PART TWO: THE ARAB EXCEPTION IN THE LATEST DEMOCRATIC WAVE, AT ANY RATE TO DATE

Over the last two centuries, democratic developments across countries have unfolded in clustered waves. Samuel Huntington, known to buggy visitors for his pioneering views on the clash of civilizations, has also been a pioneer on these waves. He identified three over these last two centuries or so. More accurately, we can identify four.

(1) Starting with the US revolution of 1776, followed about a decade later by the French revolution --- far more radical in its ideology --- the first wave lasted for about a half century, leading to warfare throughout Europe and Latin America and ending with the monarchical defeat in Europe of Napoleonic France and later the Latin American struggles for independence in the 1820s. Out of all this turmoil, only the US emerged as a solidly institutionalized democracy, but the legacies of those decades continued, ideologically and otherwise --- often with violence --- to shape Europe and Latin America for decades. [The British themselves, drawing a lesson, opted by the mid-19th century for gradual national independence with democratic legacies in the English-speaking colonies like Canada and Australia, a policy later extended to the rest of the empire, often with limited violent struggle for freedom, after 1945.]

Don’t worry: the article on Iraq and its democratic prospects --- for that matter, those of the other Arab countries --- is still in the works, scheduled to start appearing tomorrow . . . probably in three or four versions. In the meantime, a good article link in the New York Times science section today directly relates to what the lectures in political science 121 --- international relations theory --- have been dealing with the last month or so. What follows is an extended version for buggy visitors that was sent earlier today to the students in that class and other subscribers to gordon-newspost.

Note: no need now to click on the Times link. First, follow the argument uncoiled here, then --- at the appropriate point toward the end --- you'll find the link again, at which point click away.

The commentary should help you understand the rooted mental causes of power politics and warfare, the outcome of millions of years of evolution by hominoids and modern homo sapiens in small clans of 10-40 or 50 people, the maximum limit imposed by the need to gather food by foraging and hunting on a daily basis. For those 6-7 million years --- until the agricultural revolution and the emergence of city states in Mesopotamia and elsewhere around 6000 years ago --- those pre-humans and then our own species who always lived in clans were all genetically related to the other members. Literally; nothing mythical about it. The outcome, charged with wider political implications?

(ii.) Contemporary Nationalism and National-Identities Are A Matter of Both Hard-Wired
Propensities And Social Learning: The Wider Consequences for International Relations.

As you’ll see, thanks to this evolutionary history, the them-us distinction in people's mind --- remember, marked by competitive categories and simplification: call these stereotypes --- seems to be hard-wired into our brains and social life, the point of the NY Times article as you'll see . . . and also, come to that, additional evidence for the buggy prof’s lectures. Note right off though: the specific content of any group’s social identity --- these days, say, national identities encompassing 1.3 billion Chinese or 290 million Americans --- is a matter of social learning, a cultural product. So too are the degrees of mistrust towards others, never mind the extent of aggressivity or hostility.

These can also change noticeably over time. Think of the big shifts in German national identity from the 1930s and WWII era of Nazi raw aggression and rippling racist extermination to the Federal Republic today. (Remember too: the big changes in German nationalism and the development of a stable democratic country derived from total defeat in WWII and the occupation of the western sectors by the US, Britain, and France. Similar changes in Japan emerged out of the same circumstances of WWII, with the US alone in overhauling Japanese institutions and policies.)

Still, Germans remain ethnocentric --- as do the other EU countries (Britain’s national identity and resistance to European federalism more powerful than others in EU survey [polls) --- and the EU is far from being a unified federal state, let alone one anchored in a solid, overarching shared identity across 25 member states. For that matter, German national identity still retains certain competitive categories --- not least, to judge by the dominant thrust in the German media nowadays, in terms directed at the US a major "the other".

These general points, abstract as they are, should emerge with clarity as you read on.

Even as the 5th and last article on the democratic prospects of the Arab Middle East --- specifically, starting with post-Saddamite Iraq --- is close to being in the pipeline, a visitor left us a set of comments that deserve to be replied to. They deal less with Iraq than with the Arab peoples as a whole. When you've finished reading the comments and the buggy reply, you should be able to grasp better a couple of key points in this mini-series on the Middle East's democratic prospects:

1) What the differences are between a solid, effective liberal democracy on one side and, on the other, transitional democracies of a post-authoritarian character, marked mainly by free elections but deficient in many of the key characteristics that underpin liberal democratic practices . . . political, legal, and social.

2) What seems more realistic, and still very significant should it materialize, about Iraq's prospects for emerging as the first clearly electoral democracy with some clear prospects for further democratic development . . . and all that this would likely mean by way of spillovers, deliberate or otherwise, for the 280 million Arabs still living in 21 dictatorial regimes, never mind 70 million Iranians just next door to Iraq.

Don't forget: those spillovers if they occur are part and parcel of the war on terrorism.

That war isn't just military or matters of intelligence and legal punishment, nor of improved homeland security. It is also a clash of ideas and ideals. In particular, some way has to be found to dampen the enthusiasm that now exists on the grass roots level throughout the Arab world for radical Islamist movements and terrorist heroes, seen as champions of Islam under assault.

On this score, democratic development would be the best cure. As the survey evidence cited in the second and fourth articles in this mini-series showed, there's a clear correlation between democratic government and the population's condemning, say, bin Ladenism as murderous and criminally evil. Secular and democratic Turkey, for instance, is almost as negative about bin Ladenism and Al Qaeda as the European democracies. Among the Arab countries cited, Morocco does better in this connection than Jordan, and they both do better than Saudi Arabia . . . at any rate, in the survey carried out after 9/11 by the Saudi secret police, which showed that 95% of Saudi men in their twenties and thirties admired bin Laden and his terrorist massacres. Not surprisingly, as we'll see in the next article, Morocco scores better than Jordan in their democratic prospects. Saudi Arabia's ranking, by contrast, is near the bottom of the barrel.

I'm not as optimistic as you about the prospects of "yanking 21 Arab dictatorships into the 21st century". True, the Allies imposed a democratic government on Nazi Germany after World War II. However, the Nazi Party and its ideology was only around for roughly 20 years (counting the interwar period), while Islam and the fundamentalist versions have been around a lot longer.

Another difference is that the Germans were much more receptive to American occupation than any Arab country, because the German choice was to be occupied by the West or the Russians. The Germans generally preferred to be in the Western zone; hence the construction of the Berlin Wall. By contrast, there is no such situation for the Arabs: they're already convinced that the U.S. is inherently evil, and they certainly don't look to the U.S. to save them from anything. Can these people really be turned into liberal democrats? I'm not so sure, and I'd hate to think that the lives of Allied troops are being wasted on what may well be a futile effort.

Thank you for the comments. I'll try to deal with some of them here in this article, with most of the key points by way of reply --- and other ramifying analysis --- needing to await the next article in the series. It should be published soon. Right now, there's still some literature I'm wading through.

Keep in mind one thing: your reference at the end to "liberal democrats" is misleading. Nobody has claimed that will happen in Iraq . . . not soon, maybe not for a long time; maybe even --- I hope not --- forever. For the time being, we've been talking about something more modest: the prospect that Iraq can move into the transitional democratic category. That means, at a minimum, free, competitive elections (if need be, with international monitoring); political parties free to organize and select candidates for office; a consensual government grounded in the electoral process; and the beginnings of a rule of law.

Such a start would entail some transparency and accountability of the executive and bureaucracies, a progressively independent judiciary, and increasingly law-abiding police, security, and military forces that are accountable to the constitution . . . not to the politicians or leaders in control.

1. A vigorous rule of law has to exist --- with everyone, even presidents and parliamentarians and generals and judges and rich people, treated fairly and equitably in the same manner. Simultaneously, the civil liberties of all citizens have to be effectively protected, above all by a well-anchored system of due process and transparency based on impartial law. And --- one measure of all this --- corruption and nepotism in public life have to be energetically curbed and effectively punished.

2. Governmental laws and regulations have to be generally consented to voluntarily, as legitimate and morally obligating, by the vast majority of the citizenry --- rather than obeyed out of self-interest or fear of being punished by the courts and police for evasions. One clear measure here: spontaneous compliance with the laws and policies even by those who opposed their passage through democratic means.

3. The government needs to be able to ensure that it can tax effectively in a constitutionally designated way, with the ability to raise revenue for its basic services and other policies that are decided upon by proper legal and constitutional processes. Some sense of equity needs to exist here. Massive tax evasion is a sign that the citizenry doesn't feel a moral obligation to be law-abiding.

4. A liberal democracy also requires a vigorous civil society: a free media, free trade unions, independent self-regulating professions like law and medicine, a politically independent system of higher education, cause groups galore, free churches, business and financial associations, interest groups, solidly rooted political parties at the grass roots level, and the like.

5. The higher-quality liberal democracies --- Northern Europe and the English-speaking democracies, say --- are marked by a wide radius of trust among the citizenry, which allows a great deal of spontaneous cooperation for common ends. When, by contrast, mistrust and cynicism flourish among wide swathes of the population, they are clear signs of a narrow or fragmented radius of trust. In lower-quality democracies --- or transitional ones, never mind authoritarian countries --- serious cleavages in their socieites may divide the population along the lines of ethnic or tribal gaps, family clans, social classes, and possibly regions. Worse, frequently, mutual suspicions and fears may congeal along such cleavages and create not just strong mistrust but outright hostility among the groups in any country.

In such social circumstances, little spontaneous compliance with formal laws and regulations will exist. Corruption and tax evasion will likely be rife well. Then, too, the prospects of eruptive violence --- whether low key like limited terrorism, at other times more brutal terrorism, or flare-ups of ethnic or class-based warfare --- may hover nearby. If democratic elections do exist, they may help contain the violence --- no small matter --- and at times lead eventually to reforms that encourage stronger constitutional development and a more intensely shared national identity that offset group suspicions and mistrust. Even so, to put it mildly, the obstacles blocking success here are legion.

This, the 4th article in the series, looks directly at the compelling need for the US and its allies to promote democratic and economic changes in the Arab status-quo . . . dominated by 21 dictatorial regimes and failed economies save for the tiny, oil-rich Persian Gulf States, with the despotisms and their winner-take-all politics (not to mention the rampant corruption and nepotism) varying only in the degree of repression and use of brutal force, as well as their foreign policy alignment with or against the US and the West. Clerical-fascist Iran, a country of 70 million where a diehard group of militant Shiite leaders rules in a repressive manner despite the elected president and parliament --- despite, for that matter, a survey carried out in 2002 that showed nearly 90% of the population critical of the clerical regime --- is another major problem country for the US. Two of these states, Iran and Syria, are pursuing WMD programs with vigor. Libya's wacky leader, Khadaffi --- whose pronoucements often remind you of Daffy Duck's in the Loony Tunes cartoons (even the same half-hysterical sputterings) --- has recently renounced his programs and opened up to international inspections.

Meanwhile, both Syria and Iran seem to be supporting a variety of terrorist movements . . . no doubt some inside Iraq itself right now.

Post-Saddamite Iraq, now in transition --- experiencing a turbulent period that has to be expected to persist the closer the June 30th deadline of transferring sovereignty to a care-taking transitional government there, itself to run the first democratic elections next January --- is the pivot here. If a consensual, constitutional government can be created there with growing security and economic prospects, then the spillovers onto the rest of the Middle East will be of great momentum, something Tony Blair agrees as much with as George Bush. As the British Prime Minister noted in an article published earlier this week in London,

So, to rephrase Tony Blair's statement as a query, what are the prospects of democratic change in Iraq and the larger Arab world succeeding?

That key query is precisely what the next article in the mini-series will grapple with. If need be --- if the argument there requires more space --- the series will be extended to yet a sixth article.

Here, in this article, our task is more focused. Given the spun-out nature of this argument over the last two weeks, never mind its complexities and ramifying analysis, it seems advisable to help remind faithful buggy visitors what its pivotal points so far amount to: in particular, why it's essential that the US and its allies in Iraq persist in the campaign to initiate sweeping changes, political and economic, in the dangerous Middle East status-quo. As things now stand in the 21 Arab dictatorships, they're a fertile breeding ground --- amid a burgeoning population explosion, half the 300 million Arab peoples under the age of 15, with half of all Arab men in their late teens and early twenties unemployed, no prospects at all --- for future jihad-obsessed recruitment to Islamist terrorism.

Something has to be done to change that status quo. On their own, the Arab despots themselves are unwilling to initiate the needed drastic reforms --- on the contrary. Right now, only the US, along with its democratic allies in tansitional Iraq --- from Japan, Australia, South Korea, and Mongolia (yes, democratic) in Asia to 20 of our 25 NATO allies --- have the power to begin nudging change of the sort that Prime Minister Blair endorses in his statement.

American foreign policy, as the first article in the series documented, has undergone a radical shift the last few months, visible in outline form even before that, though, as part of the effort to topple Saddamite Iraq and seek to promote there the first consensual constitutional government in the Middle East, with guarantees of respect for human and civil liberties . . . including a parliament, the right to form political parties, a new constitutionally loyal military and police force, a free media, and the beginning of a rule of law.

A rule of law, as the second and third articles on democratic government noted, entails fair and equal treatment of all the citizenry of the country, however powerful or humble of whatever their ethnicity and religion; a politically independent system of courts, prosecutors, and lawyers --- all of whom have to be trained in a rule of law; and the promotion of transparency in political and administrative life, including a crackdown on corruption and nepotism . . . rife in Arab history and culture, and a major cause of the economic backwardness of the Arab peoples.

The simplest answer: the war on terrorism. In particular, the 9/11 massacres underscored, by a variety of evidence cited in the earlier articles, how widespread the support for militant Islamist fundamentalism in the Arab countries and wider Muslim world happens to be . . . including admiration for bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

Something needs to be done to reverse this support. In the Bush administration, the key premise behind this radically new US policy is the close connection in the Arab and wider Muslim world --- brought out by survey data in different polls over the last 2.5 years --- between a country's degree of autocracy and economic failure, on one side, and support for militant fundamentalist Islam and terrorism in the population. As the recent Pew Survey of Global Attitudes showed, a large majority or plurality in the Muslim countries surveyed except in democratic and secular Turkey admired bin Laden.

There is other survey evidence too. A secret Saudi poll, administered shortly after 9/11 and leaked to the western media, found that 95% of Saudi men between 25 and 41 years of age admired bin Laden. That was the fall of 2001. A few months later, a Gallup Poll taken in 9 Arab countries showed that 60% of those queried denied that Muslims had even been involved in the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington D.C. In September 2002 --- a good year after 9/11 --- a Gallup poll in Egypt found that a majority of the people continued to deny that Muslims had carried out the terrorist attacks.

Turkey, to repeat, is the big exception. Note, however, the difference in the support for bin Laden in Morocco as opposed to Jordan, never mind Pakistan (too bad other Muslim and Arab countries weren't surveyed). No surprise. As we'll see, Morocco --- a moderate despotism --- has better democratic prospects than almost all the other Arab countries.