The Weekly Standard published its 10th anniversary edition this past week, and as part of that had a series of articles from its writers on what they changed their thinking about given the passing of events. You have to have a subscription to read the articles, but there was one that stood out enough that I thought it worth excerpting.

The excerpt is from Reuel Marc Gerecht, a specialist in international affairs and intelligence reform. I focus on this one because I have gone through a similar transformation myself. In both his case and mine, the 9/11 attacks were a catalyst, although the facts were there to see. I’ll have some comments below on areas where I’ve changed my mind and where I haven’t. First I’ll let your read Gerecht’s description of the intellectual shift:

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 Atat????rkist 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 Atat????rk 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…

For me, the greatest change was with regarding to Egypt and Saudi Arabia; our close relationship with these two oppressive regimes was stirring anti-Americanism, not creating stability. I concluded that we had to cut off aid to the former, and get a lot tougher with the latter. Getting tough with the Saudis, of course, meant getting our military out of there, and that (among other reasons) meant getting rid of Saddam.

Also, the idea of helping the Iraqis establish a democracy in their country began to make sense. Bernard Lewis made two key arguments that impacted me: (1) Democracies are harder to build than dictatorships, but they are harder to destroy; and (2) countries with democratic institutions tend to be friendlier to one another, in part because of the common values they share, and in part because a great portion of the population suddenly has an interest in facing down terrorist enemies which are common to all. I’ve also probably become more pro-Israel since 9/11, as I’ve spent a lot of time reading Arabic newspapers and watching Al-Jazeera and seeing how terrorists are glorified in the mainstream Arab media. After 9/11, it is like a bond with the Jewish people; we stood by in the 1930s, and came too late a decade later. We must not do so again.

In terms of paradigm shifts, I also shared with Gerecht a worldview hugely influenced by Anglo-Saxon political theory and a Realpolitik view of world affairs. While I still don’t consider myself a Neo-Conservative, I’ve certainly moved their direction somewhat on the spread of democracy issue. I still believe it is going to take quite a while in the Arab world, and I’m not in favor of pushing too hard, but the pre-9/11 policy of indifference to a friendly tyrant had to go. This is especially true in the Arab world, where autocracies smother non-Islamist civil society while Islamist militants use their mosque-based and informal religious networks to organize and gather support. This is partly why Islamists are the only strong opposition force in countries like Egypt and Syria. But at least now we know what the problem is, and what the solution isn’t, and now we’ll have to find a better way of dealing with the Arab world in the future.

Contributed by Kirk H. Sowell of Window on the Arab World, and More!