LONDON: Can the West democratise the Middle East? Clearly, the answer is no. But whether the Middle East can become democratic is a very different question.

The notion that any country can democratise any other country leads us to misunderstand the fundamental concept of democracy building and misread our own history in Britain or America, where the struggle for democracy was a long, slow and internal: a struggle in which people over centuries seized their own rights, and not one in which overnight a foreign invading army somehow liberated us from external conquerors and made us free.

Wars fought even in the name of noble objectives create not democracy but anarchy. Any social scientist will tell you that anarchy is the condition in which tyranny breeds. Where you have previously had a secular tyranny like in Iraq, you might get a theocratic tyranny. In places like Afghanistan where you have had a theocratic tyranny, you may get a warlord tyranny.

Left to its own devices, Iran is far more likely to achieve democracy, though slowly, than Iraq where it has been imposed from the outside. Democracy comes bottom up and not top down.

Recent events show therefore that “preventative democracy” is a better answer to terrorism than preventative war, but for ”preventative democracy” to work we must understand the nature of democracy. By failing to do so, America has turned what might have been friends of the democratic process in Iraq into humiliated and vengeful enemies of the US military.

The US and British Governments seemed to imply that if you liquidated the Baathist dictatorship, automatically in its place would appear overnight a democracy, as if the only thing that stood between Iraqi society and democracy was the presence of a dictator.

American history from 1776-1789 and through the civil war shows the 200 hundred years it took to achieve an insufficient democracy in the United States. Our leaders would do well to first read our own history prior to talking about having to democratise other people. You don’t start with a Parliament, a Bill of Rights, a constitution, a free press and an independent judiciary, but with citizenship, education and civic institutions in the neighbourhood. When Alex de Tocqueville toured America in the 1830s, he found much that was wrong, but was pleased that liberty was local and started with civic institutions.

Real democracy building requires a concentration on education, a fact recognised in the formative years of the US when John Adams of Massachusetts agreed with Thomas Jefferson of Virginia that the constitution would not work without state education for all who would be citizens. In the formative years of the United States, If America had understood this it would have put its tanks not in front of the Iraqi Energy Ministry but the schools and libraries.

The most militant and adversarial Muslim sect has not hesitated to create Wahhabi madressahs in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to educate 40,000 children of Afghani refugees. They understand the value of schools, even where hate is the pedagogy. We’ve forgotten. American largesse is spent on training the Pakistani military at the same time as we’re neglecting to help develop the indigenous schools system.

But, though we must support civil society, outside powers cannot prescribe a democratic formula. Democratisation has taken many different paths, from Anglo-American common law to Continental Roman law; from the emphasis in Switzerland on communal freedom with American emphasis on individual freedom. When it comes to the rest of the world, we think it’s got to be done the American way.

We Fed-exed the Afghanis the Bill of Rights rather than seeing the need for democracy to develop that accommodates the local history and culture. The only thing that we can export from our own experience is the heterogeneity of that experience. Even today in Afghanistan the one democratic institution that looks like it could work is the grand council, or Loya Jirga, the only genuinely indigenous institution. If democracy is exogenous it cannot take root and will be blown away by the first gale, as in Haiti where there was a short-lived experiment with democracy America style.

Democracy means the right of people to make mistakes on the way to reclaim their own liberty. When France thought, along with the US and Britain, that the Algerians had made a mistake in voting in the 1991 primary elections for a relatively modest Muslim party in conjunction with the Algerian military they withdrew the democratic mandate. The resultant ten years of civil war, terrorism and the death of the middle class were far worse than if the electoral results had been supported.

Finally, democracies must be allowed to make fundamental political and economic decisions. The US with the complicity of Britain is making all of the vital decisions that will determine the future shape of Iraqi society before there is a government to either approve or disapprove of the decision. They have announced that there will be a privatised media, a privatised energy industry, an independent judiciary, a Bill of Rights and that Baathists will be persona non grata in future governments.

These may be prudent and wise decisions but they are not decisions for the United States to make. By making these sweeping changes on the ground, the fundamental sovereign decisions of an Iraqi regime have been removed. Even if in a couple of years Iraq achieves some form of minimalist democracy, the government will have nothing to do but decide the detail of how to apply the blueprints dreamt up in Washington. Democracy that empowers people is an apt answer to terrorism, which is an ideology of the powerless, but that democracy must be real.

(Dr Benjamin Barber is a former advisor to President Clinton. This article is extracted from his Foreign Policy Centre/Civility lecture on “Can the west promote democracy in the Middle East” at the London School of Economics last week) —Dawn/The Observer News Service.