Democracy in The Middle East - Western Intervention

Western Intervention

After the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, many of the empire's former territories fell under the rule of European countries under League of Nations mandates. Thus, European powers were instrumental in establishing the first independent governments that emerged out of the Ottoman Empire. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for allies in the region and the U.S. has been accused of supporting dictatorships contrary to its stated democratic principles. The 1957 Eisenhower Doctrine was the beginning of a policy of American democracy promotion in the Middle East and North Africa(MENA).

The 9/11 attacks were in other words, a significant turning point for the U.S's shift from the political rhetoric, to the real cause of the democratisation principle in the region. As a result, the U.S with some allies, have in recent years invaded Afghanistan and Iraq partly for purposes of establishing democratic principles.

Opponents of the act have however, criticised that democracy cannot be imposed from outside. The two countries have since had relatively successful elections, but have also experienced serious security and development problems.

Some believe that democracy can be established "only through force" and the help of the United States. Writers such as Michele Dunne, when writing for the Carnegie Paper concurs with the rhetoric of the late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin (at that time, referring to peace and terrorism) that the foreign policy position of the US should be to ‘pursue peace as though there were no democratization, and pursue democratization as though there were no peace. In other words, the U.S. government should pursue reform and democratization as policy goals in the first instance without worrying excessively about tradeoffs with other goals." The U.S. pressure behind the calling of the 2006 Palestinian legislative election backfired, resulting in the democratically sound victory of Hamas, a "huge blow to the advocacy of democracy in the Middle East". Drawing upon the ideas of Middle East scholar Nicola Pratt it can be argued that:

"…the outcome of democratization efforts is …contingent upon the degree to which actors’ chosen strategies contribute to either reproducing or challenging the relations of power between civil society and the state."

However, recent academic critics have characterized intervention in the Middle East as a means towards engendering democracy a failure. The 2011 study Costs of War from Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies concluded that democracy promotion has been flawed from the beginning in both Iraq and Afghanistan, with corruption rampant in both countries as the United States prepares to withdraw many of its combat troops. On a scale of democratization established by Transparency International, Iraq and Afghanistan are two of the worst-ranked countries in the world, surpassed in corruption by only Myanmar and Somalia.