Today, the most significant threat to Western security emanates from the Middle East. One of the obvious causes of this scenario is that the Middle East is ridden with totalitarianism, economic failure and cultural backwardness. It becomes evident, therefore, that the confrontation between the West and militant Islam could be fundamentally minimized if the Middle East went through a process of democratization and secularization. But is democracy even possible in the Middle East? To discuss this issue, Frontpage Symposium has invited Rick Shenkman, the editor of the George Mason History News Network and an associate professor of History at George Mason University; Farrukh Dhondy, a writer and columnist living in England who is the author of C.L.R. James: A Life; Eric Margolis, an international syndicated columnist and broadcaster who is the author of War at the Top of the World — The Struggle for Afghanistan and Asia; John Voll, a Professor of Islamic History at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University; and Marni Soupcoff, an attorney and Toronto-based writer who is a frequent contributor to http://www.iconoclast.ca.
The symposium interlocutor is Frontpage Magazine's associate editor, Jamie Glazov.
Question #1: Before we get into a deep discussion, let us see if we agree on the assumption of this symposium: do repressive governments in the Middle East turn out more terrorists than democratic governments?
Margolis: Since there are no democracies in the Mideast, except for Israelis in Israel, we really have no way of knowing. But I believe terrorism is private-enterprise warfare caused by the enormous frustration across the Mideast with impotent, inept, corrupt, repressive regions that have failed to address the problems of Palestine, Iraq, and the growing US military presence in the region.
Dhondy: There is no linear correlation between repressive governments and terrorism. Saddam Hussein, for instance, is as repressive as you get, but he stamped very hard on fundamentalist Shias and their terrorist organizations. Gaddafi will sacrifice his terrorists when it suits him and Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan is very selective about which terrorists he encourages and which ones he hands over to the FBI. Democratic countries are in danger of harbouring terrorists simply because they allow freedom of movement and association — the '9/11' murderers lived and plotted in Germany.
Shenkman: Over the long term, democratic societies will produce fewer terrorists than repressive ones. As the Founding Fathers well understood, people with a stake in society will want to see it prosper. But in the short run democracies may prove less able than repressive regimes in rooting out terrorist cells. As Thomas Friedman has pointed out, Syria succeeded in ending terrorism within its borders by flattening an entire city. This is not a remedy available to a democracy. So we have to prepare ourselves for headlines of continuing incidents of terrorism in the coming years in the event democracy somehow takes hold in the Middle East. It's almost a catch-22: repressive regimes will produce terrorists, democratic regimes may be unable to capture them.
Voll: It is clear that there is no direct correlation between severely repressive regimes and terrorism or democracy and a lack of terrorists. Mr. Shenkman's "Catch 22" problem is part of the core issue when trying to analyze the emergence of terrorists. It is quite clear that repressive regimes and stark contexts of deprivation provide conditions within which people conceive of terrorism as an appropriate way to resolve their problems.
It has often been noted that Nasser's prisons in the 1960s were the incubators for the Egyptian terrorists of the 1970s. This is a reminder that while repressive regimes may appear (as did Nasser's) to have "succeeded" in containing terrorists, there is a long term price to pay unless the repressive regimes also provide alternatives to the deprivations that help to inspire people to consider the terrorist option. In this regard, it is important to note, for example, that Assad in Syria did not only destroy most of the city of Hamas, he also promoted Islamic associations, like the major Sufi brotherhoods, as an alternative to fundamentalist and terrorist organizations.
Democracy's problems arise when authoritarian repression is lessened (as in Egypt under Sadat or in Indonesia after the overthrow of Suharto) and opportunities arise for long repressed complaints to be brought forward. In addition, often "civilian" politicians seize upon emotional issues when competing for votes, and inflammatory ethnic political programs like those that emerged in Sri Lanka, can lead to political violence and a context in which some of that violence involves terrorism.
Soupcoff: Generally, the more democratic a government is, the more autonomous its populous is going to be. People in control of their own destinies who are raised in societies that rest on individual choice are going to tend to end up with things on their minds other than destroying foreigners. Sure, democracies are less equipped to efficiently stifle terrorists, but they also tend to produce them in far smaller numbers.
On the other hand, I don't want to sound like a complete Pollyanna. I know that democracy is no panacea. As we saw in the U.S. in the '60's and early 70's, when rapid social change occurs and/or the political consensus is ruptured by a traumatic historical event such as the Vietnam War, a democratic society's value system is at risk of imploding and the legitimacy of the ruling class discredited. This in turn can create fertile conditions for the emergence of unlikely "terrorists" recruited from privileged, affluent, and politically-free university students. In the U.S., the Weathermen of the late 1960s and early 1970s are a good example. In Italy there were the Red Brigades and in Germany there was the Red Army Faction. So, I would acknowledge that having a democracy alone is no magic pill to end terrorism. But it sure helps a lot.
Question #2: Is democracy even possible in the Middle East? Can the Islamic religion/culture truly allow a society where people can exercize their own free will in the way they see fit, create official anti-Islamic political parties, publicly proclaim their "apostasy" as they see fit, drink alcohol if they want to, engage in "immoral" behavior (i.e. pre-marital sex) without the threat of punishment — and so on and so forth?
Dhondy: Yes, democracy is possible in the Middle East, but not in countries that take Islam as the creed of the state. I believe it is entirely possible in today's world for a population with modern communications and consciousness to be 'Muslim' and democratic, but even such a population will always suffer from fundamentalists wanting to force Sharia on the rest. A good mullah could prove, quoting the Koran, that democracy and parties which don't believe are sanctioned by the almighty.
Shenkman: I don't want to sound like Joseph de Maistre, who was so pessimistic he even denied the possibility that the Founding Fathers would ever succeed in turning Washington DC into the capital of a national government. But the absence of democracy in the Islamic Middle East suggests that the forces pulling people toward self-government are weaker than the forces pulling them the other direction. And it's hard to find evidence of new forces that might lead toward democracy. To borrow a cliché from the Cold War, the tide of history in the Middle East seems to be going in the direction of Islamic extremists. It is secularism that is ebbing. And secularism is essential for democracy.
Iran offers a possibility of hope. After a generation of Islamic government, Iranians by the millions seem eager to embrace democracy. But if the model is Iran, then we will have to put up with the creation of extreme Islamic states all over the Middle East before we can hope that their excesses will lead to their own undoing. And even then there's no guarantee that they will be replaced by democracies. More likely, they will spawn chaos and out of the chaos will come tyrants promising order.
Soupcoff: I'm rarely accused of being an optimist, but let me step in as the voice of sunshine and light here and say that I think democracy is ultimately possible anywhere. However, as Mr. Shenkman points out, the Middle East currently lacks the essential ingredients to make it stick. You don't achieve the benefits of a democratic system if you physically restrain or otherwise officially penalize people who are engaging in distasteful and/or irreligious behavior while not harming anyone else. And you're not going to achieve the benefits of a democratic system if the economy's not really free, but rather micromanaged by a privileged oligarchy which doles out rights to sell and do business to a select few. In other words, it takes a lot more than just opening up the voting booths to all comers to qualify as a true democracy. You also need a separation of church and state, a truly free economy, an at least minimally open society, and the rule of (secular) law. Of course, getting a slightly updated view of women wouldn't hurt either.
Margolis: I don't think will see democracy in the Mideast any time soon. As noted above, Iran is struggling towards some sort of democratic system, but so far not very successfully. Even so, Iran has more freedoms than any of its neighbors. Pakistan's attempts to create a democratic system have been a dismal failure — and Pakistan was supposed to be a model for the entire Islamic world. Even Turkey, hailed in the US in terms of what `good' Muslims should be like, is really a military dictatorship thinly disguised behind a façade of parliamentary government. If democracy is to emerge, Egypt is the most likely place. It has many educated people, a middle class, institutions and history, as well as 40% of the population of the Arab World. But its mentor, the US, is determined to keep the ruling military regime in power. As Algeria sadly showed, a truly free election may bring to power forces the west does not want.
Voll: The question mixes two broad categories: "Islam" and "the Middle East." I assume that the question is not, in fact, limited to the Middle East but is really whether or not democracy is possible in Muslim majority countries, especially if the state is in some way explicitly identified as "Islamic." The issue of the relationship between religion and democracy in general needs to be addressed initially. I cannot agree with the assertion that "secularism is essential for democracy." In the Middle East, I know that many Israelis feel constrained by conservative religious attitudes, but the experience of Israel shows that it is possible to have a state that is both clearly identified with a religion and is a functioning democracy. In terms of the Muslim world, there are important examples of large Muslim majority societies that are "imperfect" like Dhondy's India but still hold competitive (if sometimes accompanied by violence) elections in which there can be genuine changes of government. The major example at the moment is Bangladesh and another could be Senegal.
The question assumes a particular definition of Islam, which basically asks can Islam as interpreted by the Taliban or those groups that are now being called "Salafi" truly allow a democratic society? The answer to that, clearly, is "no." Old-fashioned, rigid Islamic literalism cannot provide a basis for democracy any more than old-fashioned authoritarian Christianity could. However, "Islam" is not simply the program of the extremists. Can Islam as understood by Khaled Abou El Fadl (USA) or Abd al-Rahman Wahid (Indonesia) or Anwar Ibrahim (Malaysia) provide the basis for a democratic political system? My answer to that is "yes."
Question #3: If democracy is possible in the Middle East, must we transplant it there from here? Or must it grow from the inside out?
Dhondy: Democracy has to grow from the inside out. One of the paradoxes of today is that Saudi Arabia is the root of Wahhabi thinking, financing and terror. Saddam, and Assad in Syria, are in fact against fundamentalism and jehadi tactics and both Iraq and Syria have, in recent history, stamped on and wiped out Islamic fundamentalist risings in their territories. They know that these are enemies of modernisation. Even so, it would be a step from there to multi-party democracy, but it is a possible route.
Shenkman: Mr. Dhondy is exactly right. Democracy is organic. It can't be transplanted. And that's the nub of the problem. You can tell people they need to set up elections and they may even do so. But democracy isn't about voting, it's a way of thinking. It includes respect for law, private property, and minorities. It requires a respect for the opposition. These are difficult concepts and they can take generations to develop. Nazi Germany surprised us; Germans took to democracy quickly. But of course Germans had a history of limited democracy and Nazism was totally discredited by Germany's defeat in the war. Extreme Islamism would have to suffer a similarly devastating defeat for people to embrace an alternative model. Lacking defeat, the extremists will connive against any democratic government that's established. (Think of what Hamas would do in a truly democratic Palestinian Authority.)
Soupcoff: If only we could take our own democracy and transfer it successfully to other places. Life would be much simpler (and wouldn't it be a kick to see the mullahs arguing about pregnant chads?). Unfortunately, the Middle East would probably reject the imposition of a prefabricated democracy as quickly as a transplant patient with a strong immune system rejects a foreign organ. The fit wouldn't be right, and the natural internal reaction would be to attack. Lasting change will only take place if it evolves on its own. It's bound to be a bumpy and slow road, but that's far more valuable than a temporary squeeze into the Western democratic mold that will eventually lead to a backlash.
That's not to say pushing democracy couldn't be done as a last resort. As Mr. Shenkman points out, we were able to successfully impose democracy on conquered Germany. We also did so, though somewhat less successfully, on conquered Japan. Those weren't cases of spontaneous democratic evolution. So, it's possible. But the chances for ultimate democratic triumph and longevity are far greater if it happens on its own.
Voll: If the United States in particular or the West in general insists upon a "democratizing mission" similar to the old "civilizing mission" or if it insists that all "democratic states" must look like Western "democratic states" (especially the U.S.) in the way that the advocates of the old modernization theory used to insist that all "modern" societies would be/ should be the same, then the West and the United States become major obstacles to democracy in the Middle East (and the Muslim world).
S. N. Eisenstadt has spoken of "multiple modernities," and I think that parallel to that there are "multiple democracies." This does not mean that democracy in the Muslim world must be a totally indigenous creation, but it does mean that it is important to have a broad sense of synthesis combining modern democratic experience with Islamic traditions of consultation and consensus in conceptualizing the future of political systems in the Muslim world.
Margolis: Implanted democracy has failed everywhere it has been attempted. Professor Voll, my old alma mater, has it right. Let me add this: I see calls by the neo-cons who are making strategic policy for the Bush Administration for the US to bring `democracy' to the benighted Arabs and Iranians as little different from calls by British imperialists in the Disraeli and Gladstone eras to bring the benefits of `civilization' and `Christianity' to the poor heathens of India, China, and the Arab World. If the US really wanted democracy in the Arab World, it had the past 30 years to implement it in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, etc. All this talk about democracy is hypocritical. Just look how the US has encouraged Musharraf's military dictatorship in Pakistan.
Dhondy: Professor Voll is undoubtedly correct in the sense that Islamic societies evolving democratic traditions, or having democracy thrust upon them, will bring the bias and information of tradition with them. There are however some immovables without which democracy doesn't really exist. A free press, freedom of opinion and assembly, the rule of law, the right to change a government by the will of the people and some others. Whether a democracy retains stoning to death for certain offences is ultimately it's own business, though other democracies may look upon this as barbaric and urge the people to change their minds. Finally the Soviet system which always said it was democratic — but not bourgeois democratic — imploded under forces and dissatisfactions from within — from people deciding that the one party state was not democratic enough. Perhaps Islamic societies or their female sections will find that women are not as free as they want to be under Sharia law.
Question #4: If the imams are teaching kids to kill Americans, does it matter if their parents can vote?
Voll: One of the most effective ways of closing the pro-violence madrasas is to provide appealing and useful educational alternatives. Many of the Taliban (which literally means "students") went to the pro-violence madrasas because they wanted an education and there was no alternative. I believe in the competitive power of modern knowledge and I think we should give it a chance. If we spend billions of dollars in military efforts to win the war on terrorism, we should also at least spend millions on assisting in the development of effective education. The crowds of children seeking schooling in Afghanistan are a stark reminder that if we do not quickly seize the opportunity and provide them with effective education, they will end up in the only alternative — and create a new generation of Taliban.
Dhondy: Voting parents in sufficient numbers can rid the world of terrorist imams and their schools and madrassas of this poison.
Shenkman: I am sorry to say that Mr. Dhondy has let his hopes for the future cloud his judgement. The madrassas that teach kids to hate America have to be closed down. That requires force. That brings us back to the catch 22 I referred to earlier: repressive regimes will spawn terrorists, democracies may be unable to capture them.
Would a democracy have the power to close down a religious school? A democracy after all is supposed to respect religion. So dealing with the madrassas is a very difficult challenge. People take religion seriously. Just look at the fights we have had in this — the world's oldest democracy about the use of religious language in the Pledge of Allegiance.
Dhondy: Whether this is a sign of democracy at work, or an indication of the tyranny of majorities, there has been a move by the Indian government, Hindu dominated but elected, to close down any madrassa that preaches terror, separatism and the rest.
There is a huge outcry, but finally the will of parliament will prevail. The madrassas will either clean up their act, stick to religious instruction, modernise and start teaching chemistry and genetics, convert to 'liberal' Islam — which means teaching co-existence, or be closed down. Contrary to popular opinion in the USA, Iraq's fundamentalist madrassas were attacked and closed down by Saddam!
Soupcoff: I think Mr. Dhondy's got it right. It may not do so prettily or neatly or even swiftly, but democracy can ultimately take care of seemingly intractable problems such as schools teaching and endorsing terror. These are vestiges of an antidemocratic fundamentalist society where the majority did not enjoy independence or autonomy, and these archaic social forces will eventually be swept away by the liberating forces of democracy. Let run wild, democracy can gather enormous power.
Mr. Shenkman is correct that it is not easy for a democracy to do something as serious as closing down a religious school, that we "fight" over such things even here in North America, but the important point is that we do disagree with each other. We debate and argue and disagree and cringe at Paul Begala and wish for Tucker Carlson to get a haircut and different opinions get aired. If all democratization did was allow the Middle East to reach this level of public questioning, it would still be a significant accomplishment.
Of course, my answer presupposes a traditional liberal democracy such as envisaged by America's founding fathers. If we are talking about the corrupted post-modernist concept of democracy currently embraced by the Western left, with its stress on "multicutural tolerance" for even the most heinous views and practises, and on post-colonial Western imperialist guilt, then it won't be enough for Middle East nations to have the freedom to vote. The Imans will ultimately still prevail and Islamofascism will still catch on with the young.
Margolis: Imams would not be teaching kids to kill Americans were it not for the agony of Palestine and Iraq…and the growing belief among all types of Muslims that the US has become the enemy of the Islamic World. Look at the way Hollywood and American TV treats Muslims and Arabs. Not much better than the mullahs.
Shenkman: I disagree with Mr. Margolis. I hardly think the depiction of Muslims on American TV is comparable to the rants of the extreme Islamists. Has anybody on American TV ever screamed DEATH TO THE ARABS? TV has nothing to do with this particular social malady.
But Mr. Margolis has hit upon a critical question. Why do millions of Muslims hate us? If you believe they hate us because of who we are and what we believe — the Huntington thesis — then there is no hope at all. Islam and the West eventually will have to duke it out in the streets of Cairo, Baghdad, and Beirut. If, on the other hand, you believe that the extreme Islamists hate us because they lump us in with the imperial powers that oppressed them in the past — Britain and France — then perhaps we can take certain measures to address their concerns and mitigate their enmity.
I have little hope that democracy will bloom in the Middle East desert anytime soon. I have more hope that we can over time reduce tensions by altering certain policies — withdrawing our troops from Saudi Arabia, for instance.
Dhondy: I also have to take issue with Mr. Margolis here. It wasn't the imams who started teaching hatred of America. There has always been an anti-American feeling in the Muslim world and in other countries because a) the US is 'infidel' b) it is rich. The politics of Palestine and the portrayals by Hollywood are not the spurs of Al Qaeda action — that originates in Osama's hatred of the US supported Saudi regime. Wahabi Islam becomes the rationale for such hatred. The Imams pick up the cue. It was the Ayatollahs who characterised the US as the Great Satan — again because it supported the Shah and later Iraq and their anathema was pronounced as a moral disgust originating in the Koran — again very little to do with Palestine and the portrayals of Hollywood.
Margolis: My reply to Mr. Dhondy and Mr. Shenkman: the point I was seeking to make is that special interests in both the US and Muslim World have been relentlessly whipping up hatred. Have a look at the `Iron Eagle' series of Hollywood films, for example, or the rantings of Christian fundamentalists against Islam. They are as inflammatory as preachings of some anti-western mullahs.
Voll: Part of the difficulty with understanding these kinds of issues is that we all have a tendency to talk about "the" cause of something or "the" reason why something happens. For example, the question of why SOME Muslims hate America gets answered as if the question is about all Muslims. The hatred that some Muslims feel for America is related to U.S. policy regarding Palestine and Israel, while anti-American feelings have different roots among others.
It is absolutely essential, however, to distinguish between "hatred of America" and strong opposition, even violent opposition, to American policy. In some cases, some of the strongest opposition to American policy comes from people who are trying to create American-style societies in their own homelands. These people do not hate the U.S. because they hate freedom or hate democracy; they hate the U.S. because they believe that the U.S. has betrayed freedom and democracy in their own societies by supporting authoritarian rulers.
Finally, regarding what "imams" teach in schools: it is good to remember that the idea that it is good to declare an absolute war against evil-doers is not a monopoly of extremist fundamentalist Muslim imams. There are a number of recent studies about the relationships between monotheistic religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, that show how complex this issue is. It is important to use caution in making broad generalizations on this issue.
Question #5: Can democracy take root in a country where inequality is as great as in the Middle East?
Dhondy: Yes — try India — which is imperfect in every way, but still holds elections and very often elects fools and thieves but then does it again every five years and genuinely changes governments. Look at Myanmar or Pakistan in which there is no capitalist class worth speaking of and so no modern society and no democracy. A reading of Marx should tell us that capitalism is the bedrock of what he calls 'burgeois' democracy which is the sort we are used to and fairly happy with!
Shenkman: The conventional wisdom has always been that democracy can thrive only when a middle class is present. The absence of a middle class in so many of the Middle East dictatorships is a barrier to democracy, but it may not be a terribly high one. I agree with Mr. Dhondy. Democracy is possible under conditions of great inequality. But I wouldn't want to take much comfort in this given all the other barriers democracy faces in the region.
Predicting the future of course is terrible business. But I recently came across a newspaper column in the New York Times from 1949 that suggests how easy it is to be misled by hope. The columnist, Anne O'Hare McCormick, was delighted with news that a Middle East country, using oil revenues, was adopting a five-year plan to create an irrigation system vaster than the Tennessee Valley Authority to make the desert bloom. "It is a sign," she wrote, "of the ferment stirring in the Arab world," and of the push for modernization. The country was Iraq.
Soupcoff: Yes, I agree with the gentlemen that democracy is indeed possible despite the existence of inequality. The psychological implications of democratic participation, once understood and experienced (which is the difficult part of the equation), are appealing to almost all. It's human nature to thrive on and crave a sense of self-determination, no matter how small. The tricky part is familiarizing a population such as the Middle East's with the very concepts of participant democracy, responsible government, and political tolerance.
As we've already discussed, it's not something that is easily imposed from the outside. Instead, we're best to try to wait for the natural stubborn desire for autonomy that lives in each Middle Easterner to evolve into actual movements towards self-government. Mind you, it's going to take an awfully long time unless some of the tribalism and clannishness currently endemic in the Middle East can be eliminated to allow more economic, political, and cultural freedom. As Mr. Dhondy points out, India has had its own peculiar successes with democracy, but it has done so as the country's economy has slowly been liberated from the shackles of government control and regulation, and a growing middle class has emerged. I agree with Mr. Shenkman that the lack of a middle class in the Middle East is a significant, though not insurmountable, barrier.
Voll: I would like to follow up on Mr. Shenkman's reminder that it is easy "to be misled by hope." It is at least as easy to be misled by pessimism and create self-fulfilling prophecies. Relating directly to the particular subject of this discussion, if one starts by being misled by the pessimistic view that democracy will never be able to take real root in the Middle East, then one supports and indirectly encourages the "next best things," which historically for American policy has meant supporting friendly dictators. This becomes the self-fulfilling prophecy that somehow thinks it proves that democracy had no chance to succeed.
One needs to avoid unrealistically hopeful romanticism but equally one needs to avoid debilitating pessimism. Perhaps the best example of this in policy terms is that some U.S. policy makers and pundits argued that Islamist groups supported democratic means but that if they ever won, they would be shown to have advocated "one man, one vote, one time." With that pessimism as a guide, they then advocated not allowing any participation by Islamists: The "one man, no vote, no time" option that meant a denial of democracy by the major global advocate of democracy.
Dhondy: I would like to take issue with Mr Shenkman's comment that Iraq was on the way to being a 'modern' society. It wasn't and still isn't Afghanistan and what's more it wasn't Iran where religious doctrine under Shia dictatorship rule. Saddam has outlawed 'Talibanic' practices. The Saudis have not. It is from Saudi Arabia that the money for terror and for funding madrassas emanates — from the state as well as from the wealth of the Wahhabi faithful such as Bin Laden.
Shenkman: Mr. Dhondy, Iraq is not Afghanistan. That a country with its advantages should have led to a regime of such monstrousness as Saddam's should remind us that not even secular governments in the Middle East seem disposed to democracy.
Margolis: I disagree with Mr. Dhondy about India. Its `democracy' is largely a sham. Yes, voters do vote in and out parties every few years. But that's it. After that, it bribery, gangsterism, and corruption on a mass scale by professional politicians. Like Pakistan, India is really run by the rich and powerful who use parliament as a cover for their actions. Politicians are bought and sold likes sacks of Basmati rice. These are no models for America's quest to bring Wal-Mart democracy to benighted Asia.
Dhondy: Yes, Indian democracy ends at the ballot box and a little before that some times. BUT: in the last fifty years the original privileged classes have, through the electoral system given way to new classes with power. The parties of Tamilnadu are resolutely anti-Brahmin. The votes in UP and Bihar go to the 'lower caste' Yadavs who have displaced the older ruling classes. The Yadav politicans then buy and sell each other — yes, like kilos of Patna (lower quality than Basmati) rice.
Still, India has demonstrated a disgust with the ruling classes on a regular basis and dismissed governments through the ballot box. It's army is largely obedient and — perhaps not in Kashmir — disciplined. It's press is half-free and it doesn't veer from dictatorship to dictatorship. India shouldn't be a model for anyone till it emerges from its own corrupt morass — and that I believe is a function of the strengthening of a consuming middle class, the establishment of a much larger proletariat with attendant cruelties on the way.
Interlocutor: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining Frontpage's Symposium on the Middle East. Unfortunately, our time is up. We'll see you again.
PREVIOUS SYMPOSIUMS:
Gulag Day. Guests: Richard Pipes, Paul Hollander, Vladimir Bukovsky, Eduard Kuznetsov and Yuri Yarim-Agaev.
Saudi Arabia: Friend or Foe? Guests: Stephen Schwartz, Daniel Pipes amd Michael Ledeen.