Rice on violent groups in elections
Jun 16th, 2008 by MESH
In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has offered a parting statement under the title “Rethinking the National Interest: American Realism for a New World.” The section on the Middle East includes an elusive passage that would seem to acquiesce in the political inclusion of violent groups. The Rice quote appears in green. beneath her photo. MESH has invited a number of responses. Robert Satloff begins, followed in the comments by Martin Indyk, Michael Mandelbaum, Joshua Muravchik, Matthew Levitt, and Harvey Sicherman.
 “The participation of armed groups in elections is problematic. But the lesson is not that there should not be elections. Rather, there should be standards, like the ones to which the international community has held Hamas after the fact: you can be a terrorist group or you can be a political party, but you cannot be both. As difficult as this problem is, it cannot be the case that people are denied the right to vote just because the outcome might be unpleasant to us. Although we cannot know whether politics will ultimately deradicalize violent groups, we do know that excluding them from the political process grants them power without responsibility. This is yet another challenge that the leaders and the peoples of the broader Middle East must resolve as the region turns to democratic processes and institutions to resolve differences peacefully and without repression.” |
| Condoleezza Rice, “Rethinking the National Interest: American Realism for a New World,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2008. |
From Robert Satloff
Secretary Rice is a powerful intellect with an impressive grasp of a broad range of issues, but on the question of providing access to the democratic process for armed groups that refuse to renounce their violent goals and their violence means, she has a blind spot. In this passage, for example, she mischaracterizes the situation with respect to the Palestinian election of January 2006 and the U.S. decision to press for Hamas’ inclusion.
The facts of the situation were as follows:
• The West Bank and Gaza have been, since 1967, under Israel’s military occupation. While one can debate certain aspects of that occupation, including settlement policy, one cannot debate the fact that Israel is under no requirement to permit political activity of terrorist groups committed to its destruction.
• The Palestinian Authority and all its relevant institutions, including the Palestinian Legislative Council, were established by virtue of agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Their existence and their legitimacy derive solely from those agreements.
• Annex II, article III, paragraph 2 of the Israeli-Palestinian Agreement of 1995 states the following: “The nomination of any candidates, parties or coalitions will be refused, and such nomination or registration once made will be canceled, if such candidates, parties or coalitions: commit or advocate racism; or pursue the implementation of their aims by unlawful or non-democratic means.”
• Whatever ancillary social welfare activities Hamas may undertake, its raison d’etre is the destruction of Israel and the principal means it has chosen to achieve that objective is terrorism.
Given the above, it is a mischaracterization of the situation to suggest that excluding Hamas from the election would have meant that, as Secretary Rice argues, “people are denied the right to vote just because the outcome might be unpleasant to us.” That was never the issue. The issue was that the Bush Administration pressed Israel and the Palestinian Authority to disregard their agreed legal framework for holding elections and to permit Hamas’ participation. Indeed, there were rules—and we flouted them.
Scholars, experts and policymakers are engaged in a legitimate debate over whether Islamist parties—i.e., parties whose main objective is the imposition of Shariah law—can evolve into democratic parties. By that I mean not just parties “willing to play by democratic rules” but parties that embrace democracy, which by its very nature means that men and women, not divinity, determine the law of the land. This is the debate surrounding the PJD in Morocco, the AK Party in Turkey and other Islamist parties. A subset of that debate is whether the same evolutionary process applies to Islamist terrorist groups, such as Hamas.
However, that debate, I repeat, was never the issue in the Bush Administration’s decision to compel Hamas’ inclusion in the Palestinian elections of January 2006. At issue was whether the Administration recognized the supremacy of (to recall Al Gore’s famous words) the “controlling legal authority”—the Oslo Accords—or to urge its local partners to disregard the law. It chose the latter. To suggest otherwise is revisionist history.
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6 Responses to “Rice on violent groups in elections”
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Secretary Rice’s expression of the principle “you can be a terrorist group or you can be a political party, but you cannot be both,” is a misstatement of a fundamental democratic principle that the Bush Administration has never upheld and now, apparently, would have it misapplied. The principle is “There can only be one gun, and it must be in the hands of the elected government that is accountable to the people.”
In its emphasis on elections as the means for promoting democracy, the Bush Administration willfully overlooked this principle. It started in Iraq where political parties were allowed to contest the elections without being required to dismantle their militias. Moqtada al-Sadr and the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (aka SCIRI) thereby entered the government with their militias intact, both weakening it and taking over key ministries like Interior with devastating consequences.
In Lebanon, UNSC resolution 1559 required both Syrian troops to leave Lebanon and Hezbollah to be disarmed. The Bush Administration insisted on the first but ignored the second, preferring to allow Hezbollah to contest the elections on some absurd theory that it could be disarmed afterward. Instead, Hezbollah entered the government with its militia intact and paralyzed it. Its recent takeover of West Beirut while the Lebanese Armed Forces stood idly by demonstrated the consequences of this folly: Hezbollah has forces that are now far superior to those of the Lebanese state.
Never allowing reality to intrude, President Bush did it again, personally insisting that elections go ahead in the West Bank and Gaza against the expressed wishes of the Palestinian Authority and the Government of Israel, and (as Rob Satloff points out) against the prevailing law too. Hamas was allowed to contest those elections with its militia and terrorist cadres intact, taking over the government first and then using its forces to take over Gaza by putsch.
The Bush Administration now seems to have woken up to the problem but not to the principle of “one gun.” The problem is not that Hamas and Hezbollah have been allowed to be both terrorist groups and political parties. It is rather that they are political parties with militias and terrorist cadres, and as long as their forces are not dismantled and disarmed the governments of Lebanon and Palestine should not allow then to run in elections. And the United States should not be in the business of encouraging those governments to turn a blind eye to this fundamental challenge to their authority and their fledgling democracies.
Martin Indyk is director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, and was ambassador to Israel and assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs during the Clinton Administration.
At the root of the difficulties the United States has had in promoting democracy abroad is a proper understanding of the term. Democracy represents the fusion of two distinct political traditions. One is popular sovereignty—rule by the people through freely elected representatives. The other is liberty, more commonly called freedom, which comes in three forms: economic (private property), religious, and political. (This is a major theme of my 2007 book Democracy’s Good Name: The Rise and Risks of the World’s Most Popular Form of Government.)
Without liberty there can be no democracy, no matter how freely the government has been elected. A Hamas-dominated Palestinian government cannot qualify as democratic no matter how it may come to power unless and until that group respects the rights of political opponents, non-Muslims, and women. (I see no evidence that the alternative to Hamas that the United States prefers, Fatah, respects these rights either.) Nor does the historical record, as I read it, provide much reason to believe, as Secretary Rice hints, that the experience of wielding power will turn an undemocratic group into one committed to democratic principles.
What, then, is to be done about democracy in the Middle East? It makes sense—in theory—to postpone elections until liberty is firmly established: to get right, that is, what is sometimes called, in the literature of democracy-promotion, “sequencing.” Something like this happened (although not intentionally) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in India. Great Britain implanted the institutions and habits of liberty over the course of a century of direct political control, and these survived when the British left and the Indians were able to practice self-government. Democracy was an effect, although not a deliberate purpose, of British imperial rule. Such a sequence is, however, impossible in the twenty-first century. No society will willingly submit itself to a period of “democratic tutelage” by others until it is ready for popular sovereignty.
It also follows from a proper understanding of democracy that American efforts at democracy-promotion should be directed toward fostering liberty. In Democracy’s Good Name I argue that the key to the establishment of political democracy in general, and the institutions of liberty in particular, is the experience of operating a working free-market economy. This, however, is at best the work of a generation or more.
Over the long term, establishing democracy in the Middle East may well be the way to do what the Bush Administration hoped to accomplish with the invasion and occupation of Iraq: transform the countries there for the better. But that proposition, even if true, provides very little helpful guidance for American policy in the region in the here and now.
Michael Mandelbaum is a member of MESH.
Secretary Rice is right that this is a “difficult problem,” but she muddles it. She is right to suggest that supporting elections only when we find the outcome “pleasant” would be morally bankrupt and probably also ineffective since our advocacy of democracy would be seen as hypocritical. The practical reason to support democracy abroad is not that elected governments will always be to our liking or wise rulers. It is that the practice of democracy serves to socialize populations in the values of compromise, truth-testing and moderation.
However, to say that if we propound democracy we must be prepared to endure outcomes not to our liking does not mean that we must accept the participation of groups that refuse to commit themselves to democratic outcomes. Some say that to exclude any parties from the political process is a slippery slope to authoritarianism. But the Bonn Republic excluded both Nazis and Communists on the ground that their goals were to use the democratic process to destroy democracy. Under this exclusionary rule Germany achieved the solid democracy that had eluded it before.
If it is practicable for a democracy to exclude parties with anti-democratic ideologies, it is perforce all the more justifiable to exclude parties that hold such ideologies and, to boot, carry arms in order to assert their power by undemocratic means.
This, however, is all abstract. In the Middle East we are trying to foment democracy among peoples who have little or no experience with it, peoples for whom rule by armed groups is the norm that we hope to overturn. How to get from here to there is a daunting question. To lay a blanket rule that armed groups may not participate is morally sound but may lead nowhere. Arguably, elections in Palestine could have been postponed. But could there have been elections in Lebanon without Hezbollah or in Iraq without the various parties that have militias, e.g., the Kurds? Who would have imposed such procedures or enforced their outcomes? Prudential judgments are needed in every case.
As for Palestine, I am not sure that the elections or the triumph of Hamas were bad things. Seven years of peace process had eventuated in the intifada. Why? In my judgment, for one reason above all. The Palestinian body politic was riven between those prepared to live in a state alongside Israel and those prepared to shed blood for as many generations as it might take to achieve one Palestine from the river to the sea. Yasser Arafat positioned himself squarely athwart this divide. Palestinian voters chose maximalism. Let them see what they get. This may be a necessary stage in their learning before peace becomes possible.
Nonetheless, Rob Satloff makes a compelling case about the legal dimensions of Hamas’ participation in the Palestinian elections. Even if the practical consequences of Hamas’ electoral victory are not intrinsically bad, the principle that agreements should be lived up to is overwhelmingly important.
Joshua Muravchik is a member of MESH.
Secretary Rice’s analysis correctly points out that groups must choose between being a terrorist group and a political party if they want to be accepted by the international community as legitimate political parties. Indeed, the lesson is not that elections are bad. The lesson is that elections are not the sum total of democratic transformation; they must follow, not precede, the development of civil society; and they are the product of civil society, not the precipitant for it. Elections done right have positive transformative powers. Elections done wrong are just as powerful, but they are as likely to entrench as to transform, and are more likely to have negative rather than positive implications. The slow and not-so-sexy process of building the “democratic institutions” the Secretary refers to in passing must be prioritized over the quick-fix allure of holding elections prematurely.
In the case of Hamas, which the Secretary cites, the international community’s mistake was in only trying to force the “terrorist group or political party” choice upon Hamas after it participated in elections. Because it came after the group’s electoral victory, forcing that choice after the fact was all that much more difficult. As I argued almost a year ago in the wake of the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip, “The West made a critical mistake when it welcomed Hamas to participate in democratic elections without demanding that it adhere to democratic principles. The electoral laws in most Western European countries would have barred Hamas, an extremist party, from running for political office.”
As the cases of Hamas and Hezbollah have both demonstrated, radical and violent groups have been painfully successful in walking that thin line between power and responsibility, for the most part enjoying the perks of political power without being constrained by political responsibility. They do this by explaining their exceptionalism in terms of their ongoing conflict with the enemy. That is, the “resistance” comes first and all other considerations—political or otherwise—come second.
Matthew Levitt is a member of MESH.
Secretary Rice’s statement carries more than a whiff of ambiguity. On the one hand, we don’t want armed groups to participate in elections but, on the other hand, maybe the political process will tame them. So we should not deny elections just because they might bring the terrorists to power, an outcome described as “unpleasant” to us, perhaps the greatest understatement of the decade.
There are three issues here. One is whether parties (violent or not) that do not recognize the constitutional framework of an election should be allowed to run in one. Despite its rejection of the Oslo Accords, Hamas was permitted to do so as part of an Abbas-brokered cease-fire early in spring 2005, evidently because he thought he could win while demonstrating his ability to end the intifada. When Abbas feared for the election and hoped to put it off with Israeli Prime Minister Sharon willing to play the heavy by denying the vote to Jerusalem residents, Secretary Rice was more confident of Fatah’s victory. We know the results: neither democracy nor peace.
A second issue is whether terrorists should be permitted a political role while retaining the violent option in the hopes that the “process” will “deradicalize” them. Evidence—certainly seen in the Lebanese case—suggests that this gives the group two votes, one in the streets, the other in politics; if you don’t like one you can always revert to the other. But deradicalization (grotesque word) derives from defeat in the field, not sweet parliamentary reason or political tricks. We are told that “excluding them from the political process simply grants them power without responsibility,” but it is even more likely that including them in the political process grants them more power. It is not clear to me why, after the Hamas, Hezbollah, and Sadr experiences, anyone should forecast “responsibility” from parties advocating violence and jihad. They deliver what they promise.
Finally, the third issue is whether people should be denied the right to vote “just because the outcome might be unpleasant to us.” No one denies the rights of Palestinians or the Lebanese or the Iraqis to vote, only that democratic elections are for those who declare their respect for the rules. American support for any other kind of election legitimizes those who would destroy democracy. Among the other challenges facing us in the Middle East, this is an easy one: don’t do it!
Harvey Sicherman is a member of MESH.
There is no question that Secretary Rice’s comments bear an embarrassing internal contradiction: If she is clear that an organization cannot be a terrorist group and a political party at the same time, then that should have been as clear before the fact in the Palestinian elections as after it. As Rob Satloff says, there were “standards,” but we’re the ones who encouraged their violation.
That is not very interesting, however, because it’s so obvious. At the risk of overstepping the bounds of the discussion, it seems to me that Secretary Rice’s comments about armed groups participating in elections is a subspecies of a larger conceptual error: that either a polity is democratic or it is a tyrannous. To think this way is not only to ignore the burden of history, it is even to ignore the late Jeanne Kirkpatrick!
Secretary Rice speaks of a positive “right” to democracy, but there is no such thing. People do have a “negative” right not to be tyrannized, not to have to live under a government whose lack of legitimacy congeals in a thicket of reciprocal fear between rulers and ruled. People do have a right to organize their own social and political space as they choose. The assumption, however, that the end of tyranny presupposes the beginning of democracy is simply false, for there is more than one way to produce political legitimacy. For the U.S. government to insist in preachy tones that other peoples should exercise their democratic “rights” to unseat rulers they do not necessarily fear or think illegitimate violates its core commitment to genuine pluralism—even when we do not insist upon it from the rear echelon of a U.S. expeditionary force.
This larger either/or fallacy, I suspect, begets the smaller one. If the U.S. government recognizes no form of legitimacy except democratic legitimacy, and if it sees all forms of non-democratic government as tyranny, it is liable to blind itself to the nuances that inevitably shape the diplomatic arts of the possible.
Let one example illustrate the connection. The problem in Lebanon was not that Hezbollah was allowed to run in an election without first disarming—who, exactly, was going to enforce that?—but that the election was held prematurely, under an old Syrian-wrought election law, before Lebanon’s sectarian communities could sit down and work out new post-occupation power-sharing arrangements. The Administration’s view seemed to be that elections are inherently legitimating, and one can deal with any minor “unpleasantness” later. But in Lebanon, to simplify only slightly, elections do not shape and legitimate power arrangements, they merely ratify them and fill in some personnel details. The real decisions are made through consensus-building processes, first within and then among confessional groups.
This is not democracy as we understand it, but it is legitimate as most Lebanese have traditionally understood it. By failing to acknowledge even the possibility of non-democratic legitimacy, U.S. policy pushed an election that advantaged the least liberal and most anti-Western forces in Lebanese politics. This has not just been “unpleasant”; as in Gaza, it has been counterproductive and dangerous. Lesson: Misunderstand a major concept and you’ll probably misunderstand minor ones, too.
Adam Garfinkle is a member of MESH.