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For Immediate Release
April 14, 2003 |
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Shays Statement to the Qatar-American Conference
for Free Markets and Democracy, in Doha, Qatar on April 14,
2003
Thank you. It is an honor to be here.
After last year's conference, the Chairman of the Islamic
Institute, Mr. Saffuri, said of Qatar, "In a country
no larger than the State of Connecticut, many strides have
been made and continue to be made toward the goal of a more
open and democratic society." As a Connecticut native,
I can say the comparison is both flattering and apt. This
nation, like my small state, has always played a large role
in advancing participatory democracy, civil discourse and
stable commerce.
Today I want to spend a few minutes describing our work
in Congress on efforts to combat global terrorism and the
necessity, even the inevitability, of broad-based free expression
and free markets in building and sustaining a safer world.
In the course of more than forty hearings on terrorism issues
by the House Government Reform Committee's National Security
Subcommittee, which I chair, this hard lesson emerged: We
have been at war for some time and were unable, or unwilling,
to admit it. For too long, the world tolerated the Taliban
in Afghanistan, knowing its major export was violence and
terror. For more than a decade, the world community displayed
an excess of patience and a dangerous dearth of prudence in
allowing Saddam Hussein to toy with United Nations mandates
that Iraq disarm.
Malevolent actors in this region, frustrated in many cases
by an inability to achieve their goals at home under the watchful
eyes of authoritarian, often repressive regimes, decided to
shift the battlefield by attacking softer targets in the West,
particularly the United States. But while the West may be
the target, the gun sights of modern terrorism remain firmly
fixed on this region. In dispatching 19 Saudis to attack the
U.S. in September 2001, Osama Bin Laden knew he would have
an impact in Riyadh as well as New York and Washington. The
fallout from the collapse of the World Trade Center still
clouds the relationship between the U.S. and the House of
Saud. At the same time, the Saudi regime's precarious balancing
act between Wahabi orthodoxy and Western alliances became
the subject of unprecedented, and unwanted, scrutiny in both
the Arab world and the West.
This is not the Pax Americana we expected. The Cold
War is over yet the world is a more dangerous place. Hard
on the heels of hope we were entering a "New World Order"
of growth and cooperation, intractable regional conflicts
and the rise of radical Islamic militancy brought instead
the prospect of chronic, even cataclysmic, disorder.
On the 50th anniversary of Winston Churchill's "Iron
Curtain" speech at Westminster College, former British
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher described these "other,
less appealing consequences" of this new global situation.
"Like a giant refrigerator that had finally broken down
after years of poor maintenance, the Soviet empire in its
collapse released all the ills of ethnic, social and political
backwardness which it had frozen in suspended animation for
so long." In 1996, she was prescient enough to warn of
the threat posed by radical Islamic movements and the "middle
income countries" - Iraq, Iran, Syria and others-- shopping
for chemical and biological weapons in the post-Soviet toxic
bazaar.
The Iron Curtain has been replaced by a Poison Veil that
threatens to shroud the world in dread and horror.
Piercing that veil will require not one military thrust,
but millions upon millions of daily pinpricks in the ancient
fabric of Arab resentments and victimhood. Those small stabs
at self-reliance and self-esteem will come in the form of
new ideas and economic choices knit tightly into civil and
political life. If, as has been said, destiny is written in
demographics, the ticking population time bomb in this part
of the world can only be defused by broadening participation
in the creation and consumption of wealth.
A man or woman with a job, with food on the table, with a
stake in the economic status quo, and with opportunities
to improve life for their children, their tribes or their
sect, will have neither the time nor the inclination to succumb
to the terrorist recruiter's siren song. Or, as President
Woodrow Wilson put it, "Business underlies everything
in our national life, including our spiritual life. Witness
the fact that in the Lord's Prayer, the first petition is
for daily bread. No one can worship God or love his neighbor
on an empty stomach."
The process of reconstruction in Iraq should offer interesting,
and I suspect difficult, lessons in the transition to democratic
institutions and free markets. There are many temptations
to avoid. One is oil wealth. Oil and democracy do not mix
well.
With the exception of Norway, which had a democratic tradition
before it had a petroleum industry, no nation dependent on
oil for the bulk of its national income has been able to develop
the economic diversity which fuels pluralism and tolerance
in civil and political realms. Concentration of wealth breeds
concentration of power. Once consolidated in a family or region,
that power is difficult to redistribute particularly when
the oil money used to buy off or suppress popular yearnings
dries up. When the oil is flowing, there is no incentive to
share power. After the wells are capped, even a willing government
lacks the means to ease the transition to more participatory,
entrepreneurial systems. Faced with the apparent choice between
survival and chaos, between the rule of law and civil war,
entrenched interests will opt for further repression, not
liberalization.
This model of the "resource curse" should be avoided
in post-war Iraq. Of course, oil wealth must be exploited
to rebuild that nation's physical infrastructure. But that
infrastructure should move more than oil. It should facilitate
the movement of ideas, people and goods into and out of a
diversified marketplace.
Nor are democratic institutions particularly suited to ameliorate
or bridge deeply rooted ethnic or tribal divisions. A more
mature, or more homogenous, civil and social order provides
a stable foundation for democratic habits and institutions.
Cultural adaptation of democratic models and incorporation
of historical national symbols and customs, as is being done
in Afghanistan, can help draw long divided factions into the
common enterprise of government.
Ancient cultural and economic gulfs can be bridged by a willingness
to embrace open social structures, inclusive civic processes
and private, not state-controlled, markets. It can be loud
and messy, which often offends Eastern traditions of order
and public consensus.
In the U.S., our politics often look fractious and indecisive
on television. But it is a mistake to equate a diversity,
even a cacophony, of views with a lack of strength or resolve.
Political, social and economic outlets for expression and
dissent draw energy and adherents from destructive, violent
modes of participation in the affairs of state.
The universality of these ideals - self-determination and
economic freedom - should be undisputed. Democracy and free
markets are not Western cultural idiosyncrasies or cultural
poison pills brought here to gut Arab culture and mores. The
West has no exclusive franchise on those rights and aspirations
so dearly purchased, interpreted and defended by evolving
societies throughout human history. In fact, as one U.S. Arab
scholar recently observed, "[D]emocracy is not a foreigner's
gift." It springs from native soil fertilized by a social
compact between the government and the governed.
As it happens, at this mark on mankind's all too bloody journey
to fulfill our divine promise, the United States stands dominant.
It was not always so, and it may not be so forever. But such
apogees of influence do impose global responsibilities and
opportunities on those entrusted with custody of the power
to advance the human condition. In this age, our historical
imperative is not empire, but empowerment.
In assisting the development of democracy and free markets,
we bring back to this region only the most modern manifestation
of principles and practices birthed here by your prophets,
scholars and merchants. Justice, self-reliance, religious
tolerance are not alien concepts unnaturally injected here
by an invading host. They are ideals and social arrangements
that once flourished here, but now seem unfamiliar having
been too long left dormant and dust-covered in the desert
of despair and defeatism.
One form of popular franchise practiced throughout this region
attests to the universal appeal of personal freedoms and economic
liberation: polling. Public opinion surveys from this part
of the world consistently demonstrate strong support for Western
ideals, even while capturing strong antipathy for Westerners.
At least the younger, fastest-growing segments of the Arab
population seem able to separate the message from the messenger.
They recognize the self-defeating, self-destructive path of
rejecting modernization of social and economic systems simply
because a cultural and commercial competitor got there first.
Terrorists are enslaved by their hatred. They would enslave
us all to their violent vision. Their toxic zeal can only
be defeated by market forces, the relentless inevitability
of free peoples pursuing their own enlightened self-interest
in common cause.
Thank you.
Contact: Betsy Hawkings,
202/225-5541
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