Some Forgotten History

This is a little out of step with the news cycle, but bear with me. I wanted to talk a little bit about the Soviet legacy in the Arab world. Soviet foreign policy in the 1945-1985 period will not be remembered for its contributions to humanity. Actually it poisoned nearly everything it touched. Its triumphs led to devastating wars and grim, durable dictatorships; its failures drained Soviet resources and exposed Soviet limitations. Committed to upsetting the status quo without the will or power to determine what would replace it, determined to initiate confrontations without the desire to end them, the Soviet Union left a residue of tyranny, misery and a really astonishing quantity of personal weaponry around the world. I was prompted to think of the Soviet legacy in the Arab countries by President Bush's oft-made and widely praised repudiation of 60 years of American policy that allegedly had pursued order at the expense of freedom in the Middle East. You don't need a Ph. D. in Arab history to understand that freedom was not the alternative on offer during most of that time -- secular, sometimes viciously anti-religious Soviet-backed regimes were. Egypt's Nasser eagerly sought Soviet arms and economic assistance beginning in the 1950s; later Syria's Assad, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qadhafi did the same. Part of Yemen actually had a Communist government for a time, and some of the Palestinian factions within the PLO were openly Marxist as well. The internal security practices of all these regimes bore marked similarities to those of the Soviet Union at various points in its history, and of course the great majority of the weaponry the Israelis confronted in 1973 and later, Iran faced when Iraq attacked in 1980 and we saw during the Gulf War was of Soviet provenance. The history behind this, beginning with Khruschev's effort to "leapfrog containment" during the 1950s and '60s is familiar to students of the Cold War. Conversely the specifics of, for example, KGB influence on the Syrian government's means of controlling information or the former Iraqi regime's efforts to assassinate dissidents abroad must await archival and other research that I'm not sure anyone has done yet. Here's the point, though: The Soviets were not subtle about the way they exercised influence. They carried with them an ideology proven to be highly useful as a means of asserting state control; offered unqualified diplomatic backing for whatever the most radical Arab governments wanted; and distributed some economic aid as well as vast quantities of weapons. Experts in crushing freedom and inciting conflict, they passed their expertise along to willing clients for decades. They left footprints, big ones; yet to listen to the President, administration neoconservatives and frankly every media commentator I've heard talk about the Middle East one would think the Soviets had never been there. Why does this matter? One reason might be the fact that Arab nationalism is so often being defined right now as requiring hostility to the United States. Partly this is due, of course, to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute; another part has to do with Islamist ideology. But an important part -- the one the Bush administration has bought into -- involves the idea that the lack of freedom in the Arab world is America's fault. This is no more than just barely arguable with respect to America's closest Arab allies, countries like Jordan and Morocco. Even in Saudi Arabia the United States was not so much complicit in suppressing democracy as unwilling to invent a democratic movement where one did not exist. And with respect to the Arab countries that have been most disruptive in recent years -- Syria, Libya, Iraq perhaps most of all -- the Bush administration's premise is not only wrong but absurd. People who question whether attempting to democratize the Arab world is the answer to terrorism -- I am one of them -- often base their skepticism on the negligible Arab democratic tradition. But Arab political tradition did not evolve in a vacuum, and the Soviet influence on it was as powerful as any since World War II. Liberalization or even democratic reforms might have been a little easier in Iraq and many other Arab countries if it had been presented less as America's gift to Arabs and more as an opportunity for Arabs to repudiate the toxic Soviet legacy. At a minimum it is tactically unfortunate for the United States to have forgotten and allowed everyone else to forget that legacy. It cannot be wise to force every Arab seeking liberalization, democracy and greater respect for human rights to defend these as American-inspired departures from Arab tradition (though to some extent they are exactly that) and a dramatic, therefore suspicious reversal of American policy, rather than as corrections to the unfortunate influence exercised by Soviet Communists in earlier times and reflective of values America has always championed even where we could not impose them. America should have but did not reap much credit in the Muslim world for its essential contribution to defeating the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, and this is but another aspect of that problem. Major change, even when it is beneficial, is often disruptive and painful. No agent of change is well-advised to take the whole blame for it on himself if it can be avoided. If blame can be shared with a party no longer around to defend itself or make trouble, so much the better.