The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today. To mark our 10th anniversary, we invited several of our valued contributors to reflect on the decade past and, at least indirectly, on the years ahead. More specifically, we asked them to address this question: "On what issue or issues (if any!) have you changed your mind in the last 10 years- and why?" Their responses follow.
TEN YEARS AGO, I believed reluctantly in the unavoidability of dictatorship in the Middle East. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, the Saudi royal family, and the Algerian military junta were all, so it seemed to me, better than the alternative: Islamic militants who would bring an even less liberal order.
The perversions of these regimes were already evident--all had, through both oppression and support, given rise to nasty strains of Islamic fundamentalism. But the Saudis had played a special role. In their great fear of Iran's radical revolution--whose chiliastic appeal had provoked a nearly successful murderous assault upon the royal family in the Great Mosque in Mecca in 1979--the Saudis went into hyper-drive promoting Wahhabism, their state creed and the most lethally anti-Shiite and anti-Western form of Sunni fundamentalism. It was enormously difficult then to stomach the historical nonsense that one often heard from foreign-service officers at the Department of State, from senior U.S. military officers attached to the Middle East-centered Central Command, and from executives of American oil companies, to wit: The Saudi royal family was a great friend of the United States, and Saudi Islam was a traditional faith that did not threaten its neighbors. (Oil company executives and military officers who rarely know Arabic or much Islamic history can be forgiven their views; towards foreign-service officers--who went to school to learn Arabic and could, if so inclined, leaf through the voluminous tracts of Wahhabi literature published by the Saudi government and distributed worldwide--it is harder to be charitable.)
Ten years ago it was evident that the Saudis, and the Wahhabi religious establishment to which the family is wed, had gone far to destroy the tolerance traditional in Sunni Islam throughout the Middle East. Especially significant was the change in once-great religious schools like al Azhar in Cairo, a onetime staunch and successful opponent of the hatred that marauding Saudi warriors and their missionaries had always brought with them for two centuries. Oil money, notably in the form of Wahhabi-funded religious scholarships and stipends, and the strategic eminence that the United States helped give to Saudi Arabia, degraded the Middle East's more humane and forgiving ethics, descended from the Ottoman empire. By the 1990s, the double assault of Wahhabism and Arab nationalism (another historic love of many foreign-service officers in the Near Eastern Bureau) had made the modern Arab Middle East a truly ugly place.
Yet despite all of this, it was intellectually difficult to move past the fear of another Islamic revolution. For those of us raised on European, especially Anglo-Saxon, history, which underscored (and esteemed) the slow evolution of democratic institutions and sensibilities, it was particularly hard to see the building blocks for democratic societies in the Muslim Middle East. It appeared to many, including me, that an Atatürkist approach--enlightened dictatorship ushering in a secular, democratic, liberal order--was the more likely route for a democratic evolution in Arab countries.
September 11 demolished this view (which, admittedly, was pretty shaky). Dictatorships that both encouraged and suppressed Islamic militancy had in great part given us Osama bin Laden and his new diehard holy-warrior creed. Waiting for an Arab Atatürk had become a lethal cul-de-sac. Islamic ethics were evolving in a catastrophic direction. September 11 opened my eyes to a widespread internal Muslim evolution that I should have seen before. It was blatantly obvious in Iran, where the revolution's democratic and theocratic aspirations were in a death struggle, and the latter were clearly losing, among the people and the clergy. A democratic reformation of Shiite thought was well underway. And if one bothered to look, the same process, not as far advanced, was happening in the Sunni Muslim world.
The 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq has kicked this democratic discussion into high gear. As in Shiite Iran, in Sunni Arab countries democracy will eventually succeed if the traditional community--particularly the religious classes and what is often called, somewhat inaccurately, the fundamentalist movement--becomes part of the great democratic debate. This is exactly the opposite of what I expected: liberal or dictatorial secularists' leading the way to democracy in the Middle East.
Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.