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DALJIT DHALIWAL: President Bush has made democracy promotion in the Middle East the centerpiece of his agenda. How is it going?
AMBASSADOR ROSS: I wish it were going better. You know, part of the problem is that everything was built around Iraq, and wanting to create democracy.
DALJIT DHALIWAL: And how is that going?
AMBASSADOR ROSS: Well, let's just say that it is not going very well in terms of creating a society that looks promising. Are there people in Iraq who are committed to trying to create a new Iraq? There absolutely are. But you have sectarian differences that are still incredibly formidable. You have, I would say, an adjustment intellectually but not yet emotionally, between Sunnis and Shia. The levels of distrust are really profound. Sunnis still believe they are going to be excluded in the society. Shia still believe that the Sunnis drive the insurgency and therefore they need militias to protect them from the Sunni insurgents. They see Sunnis as acquiescent in the insurgency and not adjusting to the reality of Shia power in Shia numbers, and Shia having the right to assume the leading role in the country. So, you have a very long way to go before you are going to create democracy. Now, the problem is in the rest of the region. If democracy was supposed to be given a kind of flowering within Iraq, and if Iraq was supposed to be the symbol of its success, in the rest of the region, what do they see? Well, they see enormous violence. And they see Shia dominance.
DALJIT DHALIWAL: And why would they want any democracy in Egypt or in Algeria or in Saudi Arabia, right?
AMBASSADOR ROSS: Well, when they look at that, they say, "If that is the picture of democracy, no thank you." So, I think in a sense you have to focus on democracy building on a case-by-case, country-by-country basis. What Morocco needs is very different from what Bahrain needs. And Morocco's very different from Saudi Arabia. On the one hand, you have a lot of countries in the region, and a lot of leaderships in the region, who realize you have to move in that direction.
DALJIT DHALIWAL: Give me some examples.
AMBASSADOR ROSS: Well, Jordan has launched what I consider to be a very serious reform program. It is not just economic in character; it is political in character as well. Also, if you talk to security people in Jordan, they will say, "Our answer to the Islamist threat has to be a political/economic answer." It cannot only be a security answer. And that is quite enlightened I believe. And they are not alone. You see what's going on in Morocco. You see in Kuwait that women had the right to vote and even run as candidates. You are seeing it in Qatar as well. So there is something that is important that is emerging. And it creates a need for all leaderships to somehow at least pay lip service to it. When you are forced to at least address the issue, it suggests that something is changing for the better. That is part of the mixed picture. Now I would also say some of the elections that have been pushed. Again, what it highlights for me is you have to have a pretty thoughtful approach to this process. Hamas did well in the elections. Hezbollah did well in elections. The Muslim Brotherhood did well in the elections. Because in a strange way, they looked at the elections and said, "This is a great vehicle for us. We have organization at the grassroots. The regimes do not. And there are third ways. There are alternatives to the regimes and to us." And so they looked at the elections as being an opportunity, a vehicle to achieve what they want, which is Islamic Faith. They want to use the means of democracy not necessarily to produce democracy.
DALJIT DHALIWAL: But are you okay with that?
AMBASSADOR ROSS: I do not think we should be. That is why I say, I believe you have to have certain criteria for elections. That is also why I say do not push elections as a first step in the process. I would like to see any American administration approach this in the following way. Number one, disaggregate. Do not look at the region as a whole. Policy should be on a country-by-country basis. Number two, develop country by country, a strategic dialogue with the leading reformers in the country. Listen to them in terms of how to frame what it is we say.
DALJIT DHALIWAL: But why would they want to listen to us when we have this huge credibility problem on the Arab street? How do we get around that?
AMBASSADOR ROSS: One of the ways you get around is by having a strategic dialogue where we listen to them in terms of how we frame our message. They know what is likely to resonate in their countries far better than we do. The second thing is, they still need our help. They still need help from the outside. They still need financing. They still need funding. And one of the things you want to do is talk to them about what are practical programs so they can begin to deliver services. I've talked about wanting to create a secular dialogue to compete with what the Islamicists do. They use the "dawa" to provide services. It doesn't detract from the purpose of jihad. They use the dawa to help recruit the people who will become jihadists. But what we have to do is we have to show that reformers deliver too. In fact, we have to show that reformers actually deliver something positive. And it can't just be words. They have to begin to deliver services.
DALJIT DHALIWAL: What is a dawa?
AMBASSADOR ROSS: The dawa, basically, is a social construct. It is the provision of social services. It is provision of a social safety net. Hezbollah and Hamas has basically built a following by the dawa. They create a social organization, but they created all sorts of after school programs. In the case of Hezbollah, dealing with most of the Shia in southern Lebanon they were largely disenfranchised and certainly impoverished. They built the hospitals, they built the schools, they built the roads. So it was all part of a social construct for Hezbollah and for Hamas. Jihad, meaning struggle, was part of their obvious ethos. But the dawa was also how they built a following and identity within.
DALJIT DHALIWAL: Isn't it also the radical Islamists who provide services, which helped Hamas win the election in the Palestinian territories, for instance? How do we get around an issue like that?
AMBASSADOR ROSS: I think one of the ways you get around it is, you begin to focus on how to help reforming governments deliver. How do you get them more riveted on being able to address real needs of people at the grassroots level? There is plenty of discussion of reform in the abstract, but there is not enough focus on how you organize to deliver services. I would like to see an overhaul of our assistance program so that it is also informed by a political agenda.
DALJIT DHALIWAL: So, the aid would come with political strings attached?
AMBASSADOR ROSS: Yes, for me it would. Because it should be targeted in a way that is designed to promote good governance.
DALJIT DHALIWAL: Is the administration not doing that?
AMBASSADOR ROSS: I think on the one hand, to be fair to the administration, the administration has developed things like the Millennium Challenge Account, which very much does focus on the issue of providing assistance based on good governance, anti-corruption, development of rule of law. They have in the Democracy Partnership, as well, in the Middle East. They have been geared towards trying to target assistance more for the kinds of programs that I think would be useful. The problem has been hard to qualify for the Millennium Challenge Account, and it really does not apply to the Middle East. And in the Middle East Democracy Partnership program, the scale of the program is so small as not to have the kind of effect that it might. You know, when you make policy, the world is never a world where you have perfect choices. The world is one where you have hard choices, some of which are not so easy to make. With the case of a country like Egypt, for instance, there is a desire on the one hand to look at stability and not destabilize a country that seems to be very important to us in a lot of different fronts. And at the same time, how do you ensure that you are not contributing to such a pent-up process of deep frustration that at some point, bursts out and you do not have evolutionary change, you have revolutionary change? So, I think the administration has tried to walk a line here. But I would also say here that it is a question of priorities. When you are promoting democracy, should your first priority be to push election? Especially when the only choice is a choice between a regime that is seen as corrupt by most of the public, where most of the public is alienated from the regime, versus the Islamicists who are not corrupt, who come to embody in the eyes of many, a kind of social justice, and who actually do deliver services? If those are the only two choices, guess who wins in that situation? That is one of the reasons that Hamas won. It is one of the reasons that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt did very well in all the races they ran in. They won 70 percent of the races they ran in.
DALJIT DHALIWAL: Do we have to accept a Hamas victory and any others like it?
AMBASSADOR ROSS: We favor free and fair elections, obviously. But my own view is that I wouldn't push them as the first item of democracy building, because I think you want to create conditions. You want to ensure that there are more than two choices out there. You want to create bases in which you are more likely to have democracy emerge over time. It is a process. It is democratization. It is not something that is like a light switch where you hit the flip and suddenly you have democracy. You built it over time. Now, in the case of Hamas, there were several things I would have done differently, but not the least of which would have been to say Palestinians have a right to choose whomever they want. That is their right. That is their privilege, and they should do so. They should understand clearly that from a United States perspective, we will not deal with people who are elected to reject the idea of people and who believe in the idea of violence. So, we interpret the Hamas agenda as one of the rejection of peace, promotion of violence, and you need to know we will not deal with them. You are free to choose whom you want. You do not assume that we give up our rights just because you have an election.
DALJIT DHALIWAL: So, is democratization in the Middle East, President Bush's version of it at least, inherently flawed? Is that what you are saying? Or does it need to be redefined?
AMBASSADOR ROSS: Well, I think that it would be good to redefine it a number of ways. Number one, I would say elections should not be the first step in the process. They should be in the process, but not the first step. Number two, when they have elections, there should be some criteria for who runs. Militias should not be allowed to run as political parties and still be militia. It is ballots or bullets. It is not both. If they want to make the choice and become political actors, that is fine. But then make the choice. As long as you hold all your guns, you haven't made that choice. That is part of the problem with Hezbollah running as a political party and part of the problem with Hamas running as a political party. They haven't made the adjustment into being political actors, because they still want to be militias. So, the second item is some criteria that would be respected internationally. It does not have to be shaped by the United States. They would be agreed, I think, internationally as some of the natural conditions for creating democracy.
DALJIT DHALIWAL: But reformers in the region are going to say you cannot exclude these parties. Because they have solid membership. In fact, sometimes their membership is larger than the secular parties.
AMBASSADOR ROSS: One of the things the world can do is make it clear that when elections are going to be held, the rest of the world looks at those elections as being significant if those who run in them meet certain criteria that would be the case anywhere. In Europe, there are conditions for who can run. And yet, you wouldn't say those countries are not democracies. They are. So, all I am suggesting is you use the same criteria that you'd use elsewhere for the kind of people who really are committed to democracy and the kind of people who, at the same time, are prepared to make a choice between being political actors and military actors.
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Ambassador Dennis Ross, former U.S. Envoy to the Middle East peace process
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