REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Arabs and Democracy
Forget peace for now. Liberate Iraq and all else will follow.

Wednesday, April 3, 2002 12:01 a.m.

Natan Sharansky, the onetime Russian émigré and now Israel's Deputy Prime Minister, once told us that "It's much better to deal with a democracy that hates you than with a dictator who loves you." There's a lesson here for the war now raging in Palestine as well as for the future of America's war on terror, especially when it moves from Afghanistan to liberate Iraq.

This week's establishment wisdom seems to be that the current violence between Arabs and Israelis is the result of President Bush's failure to be "engaged." Bill Clinton might not have been able to deliver peace in seven years of his own epic "engagement," runs this argument, but Mr. Bush should now sail his Presidency into the same rocks.

But what precisely is the President's engagement supposed to deliver, and from whom? He might be able to lean on Ariel Sharon again to pull back from the West Bank, but that didn't stop the suicide bombers the last time. And if suicide bombers work in the Middle East, rest assured they will soon appear in Times Square and Chicago's Miracle Mile.

We keep reading about the Tenet plan, or the Mitchell principles or the Oslo understanding. But these are all at their root land-for-peace proposals that Mr. Clinton tried to midwife over seven years. That process collapsed when Ehud Barak offered more concessions than any Israeli government ever has, only to have Yasser Arafat reject them and resume his intifada, this time with pizza parlor bombers.

The flaw in all this thinking is the one Mr. Sharansky fingered long ago: It depends upon making peace with a leader who has no democratic legitimacy. Under Oslo the Israelis (backed by the U.S.) winked to themselves that they could subcontract their security out to Mr. Arafat. Sure he was a despot, but he would be their despot. As Yitzhak Rabin once tellingly cracked, Arafat could take care of Hamas without human-rights critics and the supreme court.

This was doomed to fail because without the benefit of an election Mr. Arafat has no legitimacy beyond Palestinian nationalism. He held one vote after returning to the territories but backed out of one that was supposed to be held in 1999. Before Oslo ran into a wall, many Palestinians complained about the "Tunisian occupation," a reference to the crowd Mr. Arafat brought back with him from exile.

Without an electoral mandate, his survival depends on placating the most bitter-end Palestinians, the ones who demand a permanent war against "Zionist occupation." So instead of building a Palestinian consensus for peace, he arms his own police force and deputizes his own terror wing to compete with Hamas. Even now Mr. Bush urges him daily to put a stop to terrorism, but we wonder if Mr. Arafat could do that even if he wanted to.

The Arafat mistake is only the latest example of how dealing with Mideast dictators has become a Faustian bargain, not just for Israel but also for the U.S. American Presidents have gambled for 40 years that these rulers can buy stability, and that the alternative is far worse; in the long run they come back to haunt us.

The Shah of Iran created a backlash against the U.S. that we are still paying for. Meanwhile, the Saudis created Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, as a way of deflecting domestic criticism from their own dictatorship. It's no accident that America's best friend in the region, Turkey, is the one Islamic regime with a history of free elections.

This is why we believe the best chance for peace in Palestine, and for stability throughout the entire Middle East, goes through Baghdad. Iraq is a serious country with a proud history and, at least before Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party arrived, with something of a middle class. Liberating Iraq from Saddam and sponsoring democracy would not only rid the region of a major military threat. It would also send a message to the Arab world that self-determination as part of the modern world is possible.

This assumes, of course, that the U.S. and its allies would do the job right this time. That means not merely toppling Saddam with one more Baath thug but staying long enough to underwrite an election under United Nations auspices. The Iranian people, already restive under the mullahs, would then take heed and liberate themselves. Arab leaders throughout the Middle East would have to adapt to the same lesson, including the Palestinians.

The advice Mr. Bush is now getting, to throw himself into the middle of the Palestinian-Israeli war, is a counsel of paralysis. It will tie him down, like Gulliver, pulled this way and that by the latest bombing or "peace plan." It ultimately will derail the war on terror.

The violence in Palestine doesn't need another mediator; it needs an outside shock that changes Arab assumptions about what is possible. It needs a pro-Western Iraq on the road to democracy.