Category: Politics

True story: The Italian Ambassador to Malaysia in the mid-1980s said, upon leaving, that he was glad to be going back to Italy where the political factions, corruption, and infighting were easy to understand.  Malaysian politics were just too hard to figure out.  Coming from an Italian government functionary, that’s a pretty big statement.

It’s not that it’s hard to chart who’s in favor and who’s out of favor.  That’s fairly straightforward.  What seems a little different is that politicians can be part of the ruling clique in the ruling party (UMNO, the United Malays National Organization), and then offend someone and be banned for life from the party, only to be let back in later under the PM’s good graces and resume their careers.  Individuals even break off from the leading party to form their own opposition alliances, fail, and then be welcomed back in.  There must be some reason why a former pariah and enemy of the state, jailed under draconian "Internal Security" measures, can suddenly wind up as the Deputy Prime Minister.  It’s just hard to tell what that would be.

The best example is Mahathir Mohamad himself.  In 1969 he was kicked out of UMNO, the ruling party, for criticizing the then-PM, Tunku Abdul Rahman, of conceding too much political ground to Chinese Malaysians.  He then wrote a seminal book, The Malay Dilemma, which was banned from publication because it was seditious.  Yet Mahathir was welcomed back into the party by 1971, and was PM himself by 1981.  He was the Home Affairs Minister (while also being PM) who lifted the ban of his own book.

Anwar Ibrahim is another good example.  In the 1970s he was a leader of Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia, the Islamic Youth Movement of Malaysia.  Apparently he was too critical of the government, for they arrested him and detained him for two years as an enemy of the state.  Yet by the 1980s he had wiggled himself into UMNO and quickly climbed the ladder of power.  How could he have ingratiated himself so quickly?  The story of his downfall made headlines for months in the West in 1998-1999.  After opposition Mahathir’s desired adjustment policies to deal with the financial crisis, he was fired as Deputy PM (and heir apparent) and kicked out of UMNO.  A few weeks later, he was arrested, tried, and eventually convicted of corruption and sodomy.  He was just released from jail a couple months ago.

These are the two big ones, but there are many more.  One more example. Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah was a protege of the PM Tun Razak.  He and another politician, Musa Hitam, fought bitter battles over 8 years to become Deputy PM under Mahathir.  They hated one another, and Mahathir seemed to favor Musa.  Then, in 1986, Razaleigh and Musa made up and decided to team up to challenge Mahathir and his lieutenant Ghafar Baba for the number 1 and 2 spots in the country.  After losing in a shady party election, they resigned and ended up (after protracted wranglings that led to the dissolution of UMNO and the abrogation of the independence of the judiciary branch) forming a whole new party to challenge a reconstituted "new" UMNO in general elections.  After losing this, Razaleigh eventually made it back into UMNO again, and retired in good standing.

With all of these alliances, shifting patterns of allegiance, and backroom dealings, it’s a wonder that anyone gets anything done.  What’s amazing to me (TP) is how willing politicians seem to be to "forgive and forget."  Tun Razak forgave Mahathir, Mahathir forgave Anwar (for awhile), Razaleigh forgave Musa, and countless others.  I know that such marriages of convenience and second political lives are common in the West as well (remember Dick Nixon?), but the speed and extent of the reversals in such a personalistic political system never ceases to amaze me.

One last note: One politician who mistakenly allied with Razaleigh and Musa against Mahathir and Ghafar was an up-and-comer named Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.  After Anwar’s downfall, Abdullah’s stock seem to rise again surprisingly quickly.  Today, no longer just some backbencher, he is "Pak Lah," Malaysia’s current PM and Mahathir’s handpicked successor.

Tom Friedman recently wrote a column in the New York Times about democracy and political freedom in the Middle East.  Friedman is normally pretty good, in my (TP) opinion.  He writes about big topics, and he makes sometimes controversial arguments, and he, like any good op ed columnist, seems to thrive on making people angry.  Just what I like.  But the disagreements with readers should come from taking controversial stands that involve making a normative judgment about the social world, not from getting the facts wrong.  Like, arguing that protectionism is a good idea is fair game, but saying that protectionism doesn’t exist is not, because that’s not correct.  Which is why Friedman’s repetition of the conservative mantra that political correctness in American universities prevented the US from promoting democracy in the Middle East is so lamentable.

Admittedly, I’m a sensitive guy on this subject.  I find diatribes against liberalism in academia particularly infuriating in terms of attacking the quality of research.  This is not to say that I embrace all aspects of intellectualism–the "no confidence vote" against Larry Summers at Harvard was ridiculous, and I believe that it was an irrational response by Harvard faculty against broaching a taboo academic subject.  But people who whine about ivory-tower liberalism being some sort of intellectual closemindedness haven’t spent any time in an American university.  I guarantee you, the quickest way to get tenure or funding is to take a controversial stand and defend it with good evidence.  Arguing is all that faculty members do in universities.

I’ve heard Friedman’s claim a number of times.  In essence, the claim is that in Western universities, in places like political science and anthropology departments and Middle East studies work groups, liberals had so hijacked the debate that debate never existed, at least in the 1990s. No one questioned the perserverance of dictatorship in Arab states, because to do so would be to ignore the values that Arab citizens have, or to not respect their own cultures.  Doing that would be "Orientalist", a term coined by Edward Said to refer to the tendency of Western scholars and citizens, in good post-colonial tradition, to view the East as different, weak, exotic, infantile, and in need of Western guidance.

OK.  I spent quite a lot of time in the 1990s going to conferences, attending classes, sitting in at seminars, watching panel discussions, and the like, at a university.  You could make the argument that this university (Brown) was one of the most liberal and politically correct in the country–in a bad way.  You’d be right…when I was a senior, a group of students stole a whole issue of the daily newspaper in a protest action for it having run an ad by David Horowitz, who claims that slavery reparations are wrong "and racist too."  Pretty dumb, to my mind.  I am also quite liberal and politically correct myself.  I say "Native American," I don’t believe that we should have 10 Commandments in public places, and I someday will probably walk around in a tweed jacket and affect a fake pseudo-British accent. I was part of the problem.

But there was no problem.  Friedman and his ilk are either misremembering, lying, or they just don’t know, when they talk about the intellectual climate of the 1990s.  Hardly anyone took the stand that Friedman is talking about.  If they did, it was seriously questioned.  People vigorously debated the subject, but few–if any–people viewed the existence of dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia as a good thing for citizens of the Middle East.  Even then, democracy was propounded as a superior political arrangement.  The problem–and this continues the problem–is that invading a country to make it democratic is a coarse tool, and it has costs.  The problem was how to make democracy happen given that American politicians, neoconservative, conservative, and liberal, had little interest in invading any countries, and most were content to keep the petrodollars flowing and contain Islamic radicalism.  Indeed, the suggestion that current neoconservatives were the ones who "thought up" democracy as a tool for reducing Islamic radicalism is laughable, and wrong.

So when we talk about the reluctance of American policy makers to truly promote democracy in the Third World before 9/11, let’s get it right.  Let’s not blame it on Volvo-driving, wine-drinking, politically correct intellectuals.  Let’s put the blame where it truly lies–squarely on the heads of the politicians since the 1960s who thought that they had better things to worry about.