Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, is so imperiled that, on Monday, his son warned that mass protests risk civil war and, with it, “rivers of blood.” We hope that threat — along with Saif al-Islam Gadhafi’s bluster that his father would fight “to the last bullet” — is the regime’s dying gasp. When a wave of democratic yearning weakens an anti-U.S. dictator who has a history of supporting terrorism, Americans have cause to rejoice.
That wave is washing over other Middle Eastern nations whose autocratic governments have been upended or shaken by popular demands for reform — Tunisia, Yemen, Algeria, Morocco among them. Egypt was a tough call for U.S. diplomacy at the get-go, because of that nation’s strategic importance and its long alliance with Washington. But President Barack Obama soon grasped that President Hosni Mubarak was doomed and helped ease him aside.
Uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya may, though, prove to be the easy cases for Washington to handle. Others present complications: There is unrest too in Bahrain, a small Persian Gulf state that is home to the Navy’s Fifth Fleet. The king is a member of the dominant Sunni minority, and the government says some Shiite opposition groups have ties to the radical Islamists in Tehran. If regime change turns Bahrain into a facsimile of Iran, America will face a more perilous Persian Gulf. Despite that risk, the Obama administration pushed the Bahrain government to end the bloody crackdown it launched last week. The message, one U.S. official told The Washington Post, was, “They’ve got to have political reforms, and they’ve got to get their security forces to exercise restraint.”
Washington, then, clearly is siding with the democratic movement spreading over the region. That may sound like a tacit endorsement by Obama of his predecessor’s vision of a free and democratic Middle East — which President George W. Bush hoped would flow from the U.S. removal of Saddam Hussein.
It may also sound like a naive idealism that will betray our friends and open up opportunities for our enemies. Democracy can work against U.S. interests, as shown by the Hamas victory in Palestinian elections in 2006. But in the long run, lasting reforms should produce governments that are more stable and less warlike, because they will be accountable for improving the lives of their people. Radical Islam and belligerent nationalism are often bogeymen that dictators use to distract their people from their own failures.
As this press for freedom spreads, the administration may find a situation where it cannot afford to let democratic sympathies swamp all other priorities. In a country where extremists command considerable support — Jordan comes to mind — upheaval could transfer power from a U.S.-friendly monarchy to groups that would use it to suppress democracy. That’s what happened in post-Shah Iran.
The unsatisfying takeaway here is that while the U.S. has a principled stake in the spread of democracy, it also has a duty to its own people to uphold its vital security interests even when they require cooperation with despots. That can mean placing the latter concern above the former — as we did in joining forces with Josef Stalin to defeat Adolf Hitler.
But those cases are — and need to remain — rare. Reality in today’s Middle East dictates using our leverage on behalf of reform. Two successive U.S. administrations now have affirmed that as the American default. That’s good of the people of the region — and for U.S. interests, too.
