Perspective: Obama’s State Department Uneasy About Democracy

Why Is Obama’s State Department Uneasy About Democracy?
Jul. 7 2011 – 5:16 pm – Forbes – Richard Miniter

RABAT, Morocco—This past weekend Americans weren’t the only people celebrating their freedom.

On July 1, Morocco, became the first Arab country to peacefully vote itself into freedom–complete with a bicameral congress, elected president, protections for religious minorities (including the long-established Jewish community) and equal rights for women.

Yet the response from Washington was… cue the crickets.

The noisy silence is telling. President Barack Obama has said nothing about the first Arab country to become a democracy without U.S. tanks rumbling through its streets or mass uprisings of its citizens. Nor have congressional Republicans said much.

Washington, especially Obama’s State Department, has a democracy problem. Too many see democracy promotion as a Bush-era priority, others see democracy as “cultural imperialism,” and still others see dangers, not opportunities. The fear is that the Muslim Brotherhood or some other radical Islamist group may come to power.

The democracy doubters couldn’t be more wrong. The 19th century classical liberal thinkers were right about universal values being universal and people having a natural longing for natural rights.

Only by denying ordinary people their rights to freedom of speech and peaceful assembly is mass support of extremists born. Give people rights and an outlet and the extremists will sidelined. Of course, this must be done gradually and with care, as Morocco has done steadily since 2000.

The Morocco democracy referendum won with the participation of 73.46% of eligible voters, according to Morocco’s constitution council, the government body that supervised the referendum. By contrast, the most recent national election (for an assembly with far weaker powers) attracted only 37.5% of eligible voters. Almost three-quarters of Moroccans did not see democracy as a foreign import, but as a natural right long delayed in arriving.

And the huge turnout was a remarkable rebuke to the radical Islamists who called for a boycott. Al Qaeda’s North African wing, Al Qaeda in the Magreb (AQIM), has repeatedly thundered its opposition to democracy, which, in their view, substitutes the views of the majority for the strict Sharia law of God. They lost, overwhelmingly.

Some 97.5% of voters voted yes, indicating that almost three-quarters of adult Moroccans want real, Western-style democracy. Another 1.5% voted no, with the balance casting blank or spoiled ballots.

But Washington’s mindset is mired in the late 1960s and 1970s, when many of the senior policy makers graduated from college. Perhaps they read too much Marx and too little Mill, leaving them mentally unprepared for a complex world.

Thus, the few official statements from the State Department have been clueless and damaging.

In the run-up to the July 1 referendum, a State department spokesman used a single tepid adjective to describe the move toward the Arab world’s first peaceful democratic revolution: “encouraging.”

When I went to the Casablanca office of Ahmed Charai, publisher of L’Observateur and number of other Moroccan newspapers and magazines, I could tell the adjective still stung. His English was good enough to know that “encouraging” is what you say about a D student who has finally managed a C+.

Over the next few days, I heard that word “encouraging” parsed by a number of other prominent Moroccans, including the Minister of Interior Saad Husar, who oversees the nation’s internal police forces. The word seemed insultingly small and careful; a word best reserved for a development in North Korea.

It is not a word for a dramatic shift from an absolute (though relatively gentle) monarchy with a weak consultative assembly to a constitutionally limited monarchy with a strong, sovereign parliament and an elected president who can remove executive branch officials without entreating the king. …more