This started out as a reply to one post, and turned into a reply to several others as well. Take it as my final (I hope) comment on why I think it will be harder to set up a decent Government in Iraq - or anywhere in the ME - than many here think.
We didn't install dictators in West Germany or Japan or any of the other nations we liberated or helped liberate throughout Europe and the Pacific.
It might be wise to recall at this point that the US has never hesitated to install or prop up dictators in 3rd world countries, any time it suited our immediate interest to do so. The consequences, both for us and for the countries involved, have often been less than delightful.
The problem that the US has had with democracy in the developing world is that the chaos, friction, and unpredictability that accompany political evolution are frequently seen as intolerable to short-term US interests, making it very easy to fall back on dictatorship. The sad fact is that democracies, especially democracies in the early stages of evolution, are often not reliable allies, since the outcomes of other peoples democratic processes are hard to predict. When the outcome of the evolving democratic process has conflicted with immediate goals, our response has all too frequently been to cut the democratic process off. That hasn’t always worked out well in the long term. If we had been a little more willing to deal with the ups and downs of the democratic process that began evolving in Iran in the early 1950s, the Ayatollahs might never have come to power, and the history of Islamic radicalism might be quite different.
When the US has had to rebuild a nation - it has built democratic institutions there.
Let’s get something straight. The US did not rebuild Germany and Japan. Germany and Japan rebuilt themselves, with American assistance. That assistance was critical, but no amount of assistance will rebuild a nation if that nation lacks the social, cultural and political infrastructure necessary to support development.
The factors that enabled Germany and Japan to rebuild so successfully were the same factors that made them formidable opponents in war. They were organized and disciplined. They had a strong sense of national identity and loyalty to the nation, and a fundamental (in many ways excessive) trust in national leadership. They had the experience and expertise necessary to build and manage a mixed economy. They were dangerous in war – and quick to rebuild - because they were at an advanced stage of political, social, and economic evolution.
I am not among those who expect a campaign against Iraq to involve prolonged and bitter fighting. I could be wrong, but I expect the Iraqi armed forces to cave in before an American assault like an overripe melon hit by a car. The only ones who will fight will be the ones so closely associated with Saddam that they will have no chance in a subsequent regime. These will probably fight in the cities and make life difficult for a while, but I doubt that they will last long.
I think the problems will start after the war ends. I think that Iraq will have a hard time rebuilding for the same reasons that they will be unable to fight effectively. I don’t think the problems will start immediately – I’d anticipate a period when everything seems to be going surprisingly well – but they will arrive, and they will be very difficult problems to manage.
I’m obviously a fair distance away from a lot of the people on this board on this issue, and I think I see one reason why. Most of us are American, some European. Most of us have had a fairly positive experience, by world standards, with government and legal systems. We’ve known governments that at their best are pretty damned good, and that are functional even at their worst. When we see bad government, our natural solution is to replace it with good government.
Most of us have a hard time comprehending the perspective of people of people and cultures that have never known good or even functional government, a situation that prevails over much of the world. People in this situation often come to simply lose trust in government and legal systems across the board. They tend to assume that elections will always be manipulated, that legal systems will always serve the interests of whoever is in power. They fall back on what they know: their people, the family, the clan, the ethnic group. Their reaction to constant bad government is not to seek a government that will be good for the nation, but to seek the kind of bad government that will best protect them and theirs. This reaction is by no means limited to the poor, the illiterate and the uneducated: it is a practical matter of survival, and it emerges even among quite sophisticated individuals and groups. We need to understand that our faith in institutions and structures derives from our experience, and that those who don't share our experience often don’t share that faith.
unlike Germany or Japan, Iraq has tremendous oil riches to fund its restructuring.
I’ve long believed that oil riches are not at all conducive to the evolution of good government in developing nations. There are good reasons why oil-rich countries (not just in the Middle East – look at Indonesia or Nigeria) are so consistently ill-governed.
Even the crudest despot has to pay attention to a country’s economic base. If a despot’s economic base is in agriculture and/or manufacturing, the despot will need certain things. Management, often fairly complex management, will be required. A certain portion of the population will have to be educated. Internal infrastructure has to be attended to. Competing interests have to be balanced. It is much easier for a despot or a family of despots to control a single industry than an interrelated web of industries. Oil is a very profitable industry. It attracts corruption and rewards it extravagantly. There is no need to develop a local cadre of workers and managers; foreigners can be hired to do the work. The population can be placated with bread and circuses, at least until the oil price sinks.
I could develop this argument at some length, but this post is already way too long. Let it suffice to say that in my opinion, the availability of oil is a way for a government, whether despotic or not, to pull in money without the need to develop the social and physical infrastructure that are needed to support a mixed economy. That same infrastructure is required to support the process of political evolution.
Oil makes it too damned easy to turn to the dark side, as if the temptation weren’t strong enough already.
None of this is meant to imply that I think the Iraqis are incapable of achieving democracy. I don’t think that at all. But I don’t buy the notion that we are going to “take out” Saddam and in a few months roll out a brand spanking new liberal democracy that will inspire every other country in the region to ditch their own despots and jump on the bandwagon. That is a very dangerous proposition, IMO, because it badly underestimates the difficulty of the task at hand, and people who start a task underestimating its difficulty are likely to balk when the going gets tough.
Democracy cannot be “installed”, in Iraq or anywhere else. Democracy will have to grow and evolve in Iraq, as it has grown and evolved elsewhere. That process will take time, as it has elsewhere. It will be chaotic and at times violent, as it has been elsewhere. We have to expect bloodshed. We have to expect governments to rise and fall. We have to expect corruption. We have to expect governments to do things and adopt positions that we don’t like: an Iraqi government can be a submissive puppet or a democracy, but it won’t last long trying to be both. We have to expect civil strife, attempts at separatism. We have to anticipate that the central government may often be inutile in large parts of its territory. Most important, we have to expect that the long-term goal of democracy in Iraq might at some point conflict with immediate goals of energy policy or the war on terrorism.
Another poster points out that “The Europeans worked up the start of a reasonable arrangement 350 years ago at Westphalia dealing with hideously complex problems of ethnicity and religion and which eventually culminated in such things as the Swiss confederation and the US constitution.” I don’t think I need to describe the wars and chaos, bloodshed and atrocities, and other twists and turns that came between the start of that reasonable arrangement and its culmination in the current state of peace and relative balance. We did it; the Iraqis can do it too. But let’s not pretend that it’s going to be quick or easy.
I think that democracy in Iraq is an entirely worthy long-term goal. But lately I hear it being talked into a strategy, packaged neatly in a sequence where it doesn’t fit. “We take down Saddam, democratize Iraq, and the other dominos will fall” makes me shudder. The idea that the only way we can win the war on terrorism is to wade into the Middle East morass waving a big stick, fix all those bad governments and straighten everybody out makes me shudder. I don’t think that’s unreasonable. If others think otherwise, I have no problem with that. We’ll see soon enough. |
