Critics harp on the “hubris” of the Bush administration’s plan to democratize the Middle East. It simply can’t be done! they wail. You’ll destabilize the region! Breed more terrorists! Trigger doomsday! Sometimes, not content with this exaggerated pessimism, they opt for condescension: The Arabs aren’t ready for freedom. Worse still: They don’t want it. These arguments, usually propped up by cursory observations about sharia or other aspects of Muslim culture, are in use by everyone from the top Mideast analysts down to the anti-war student activists on the quad.
Yet, says Natan Sharansky in The Case for Democracy (Public Affairs, 279 pages, $26.95), these arguments aren’t new. They are precisely the ones many U.S. intellectuals and public figures made about the Russians—up until they were spectacularly shot down by the Soviet Union’s collapse. Sharansky, who spent nine years as a KGB prisoner for dissident activities in the USSR, is appalled to see freedom’s power again being underestimated. His book clarifies parallels between the West’s détente with Soviet communism and its more recent toleration of totalitarianism in Tehran, Riyadh, and—deflating the “Islam” excuse—Pyongyang.
A friend saw me reading this book and joked, “He needed three-hundred pages to make the case?” Indeed, many points Sharansky makes seem elementary. He devotes considerable space to the fact that oppressed people, afraid to speak out, are not reliable sources of information about their own circumstances. Doesn’t that go without saying? (Well, he says, not for most journalists—or Jimmy Carter.) The strength of this case is not merely what it says, but who says it. Sharansky speaks not from a starry-eyed idealism but from his own grim experience of what he calls a “fear society.” How can a talking head argue with that?