That is not my recollection.
But if it entertains you, who am I to say.
It may entertain you to put words in other people's mouths, but if you aren't prepared to produce citations to support those words, in might be wiser not to start.
Enhance your recollection. While you're at it, look up your own comments from the same period, and let us see how they stand up with hindsight.
From August/Sept., 2002:
Message 17896338
I think back on the last 12 years of wasted time spent "containing" Saddam, and can only wonder what might have been had we pushed the issue and overthrown Saddam.
One of the reasons that we didn't was that there was no prospect in sight for stable government, and we didn't want to commit ourselves to having to maintain an unstable government for an indefinite period of time. Are we more willing to do that now?
Message 17905812
Once we have Iraq, I do think a respectful quiet will descend on Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, since nobody will want to volunteer to be next.
I would guess that once we "have" Iraq - and, barring HIV or rabies, I can think of few things I'd want less - the Islamist priority will shift to destabilizing whatever regime we insert. That would force us to keep troops there, in static positions, ideal targets for terrorist attack and intifadeh-style resistance. The real danger here that I see is that we will find ourselves choosing between indefinite support for a shaky regime in Iraq and backing out, which would be tantamount to surrender. Regime change is the relatively easy part. What comes after is where it gets dicey.
Message 17934940
We must not allow ourselves to be baited into a position where we are occupying hostile territory, or any situation that can be converted into a war of attrition. We have an offensive military force that is impossible to oppose, but once it goes static and takes on the role of an occupier it becomes very vulnerable.
This is a role that the Islamic militants badly want to coax us into, IMO, and we have to be smart enough to avoid it. We should not embark on military ventures without a clear exit strategy.
Message 17944597
I don't like the idea of attacking Iraq without clear provocation and a clear exit strategy. I don't like it because I think that the situation OBL would most like to se is one where we have large forces in static positions of occupation, trying to maintain weak regimes that are incapable of surviving on their own. Such forces are ripe for guerilla and terrorist attacks and for intifadeh-style resistance. An extended American occupation of Arab countries would be a dream come true for Al Qaeda. No Arab army can resist an American attack, but the moment we cease to be attackers and become occupiers, everything changes.
I don't think we should go into anything we don't have a clear route out of, and I think that there are other targets in the war on terror that warrant much higher priority…
I'm not saying we shouldn't fight. I'm saying we need to fight smart, and I'm not convinced that we are doing that. I get the sense that some people are concerned that we will seem passive if we don't keep attacking people, and that the proposed attack on Iraq is aimed less at self defense than at the creation of a perception of vigorous action.
Message 17945096
I've no doubt that the Iraqi opposition will say anything that they think will encourage the US to put them in power with no risk or cost to themselves. They will describe dire threats, gravely pronounce their commitment to democracy, etc. They may even be serious, but I have to view any comments from sources with such a clear vested interest with some degree of suspicion.
Message 17976415
Those that tend to think as I do, believe that force is the only thing that the Islamists respect, and we will have to use it to solve our problems. Those who disagree think that force will backfire on us and we must work to negotiate our way out of this.
That leaves out those of us who have no fundamental objection to the use of force, provided that it is used intelligently and aimed with precision at the forces that threaten us. I had no objection to the use of force in Afghanistan, and I can think of a few other places in which it would do a great deal of good if used with direction and discretion. The indiscriminate use of force, IMO, will create more threats than it will resolve.
I think we will only succeed at this "War" we are in by forcing major changes in the ME.
A scary opinion, because our ability to force major changes in the ME is very doubtful. We can defeat the armies, but that's only a first step to major change. Democracy cannot be imposed from outside.
Message 17976461
Defeating armies and overturning governments won't accomplish the objective: the enemy is not an army or a Government, but an ideology. Can you make people stop believing in a religion by defeating their armies and overturning their governments? Will their belief become less fervent or radical if they are invaded and occupied?
Not likely.
Wading into the ME and thrashing around with a big stick exposes us to a situation very similar to that which undid the Russians in Afghanistan. We do not want to occupy a large and hostile region. We do not want to try to create new Governments that we will be responsible for preserving.
We want to protect ourselves, and that is the objective we have to keep in mind. Will a series of invasions and occupations make us more or less vulnerable to terrorist attack? That is the question we need to answer. My own suspicion is that the Islamists would be only too happy to see us wade in and start punching the tar baby…
If the governments we install prove to be unstable, unable to enforce their laws, vulnerable to external aggression and domestic ferment, we may find that our ability to find and neutralize Islamists is no better than it is now. We may also find that the Islamists have an easier time recruiting than ever before.
Message 17976995
I think that the difficulty of creating a functional democracy in a country with three distinct ethnic/religious groups, all of which loathe each other (to start with only the most obvious problem), is being seriously underestimated.
Message 17980702
The problem that arises when developing countries try to convert to western-style democracy is that many of these countries aren't "nations" in the sense that we understand nationhood. They are sets of wildly different cultures, often ones violently disliking each other, with their borders defined not by their own relations, but by the collisions of colonial powers generations ago. In many cases they have only been held together by force. In most cases individual loyalty is not to the abstract concept of a nation but to the individual clan or ethnic group.
Try to establish political parties and democratic structures in an environment like this and you will see them very quickly coopted into devices for furthering the interests of one ethnic group at the expense of others. Political parties do not break down by ideology, they break down by ethnicity, with predictable consequences.
None of this is unnatural. In Europe centuries of bloodshed were required before the various groups could settle on collectively acceptable national boundaries. In the developing world this process was interrupted by colonists, who drew their own boundaries to suit their own convenience, and enforced them with force. When the colonists pulled out, dictators took over, and held the constituent parts of their "nations" together by force. Take force away and the irrationally lumped communities will resume the natural process of finding their own borders, which often involves a good deal of bloodshed and chaos.
We have seen this happen all over the world.
Unfortunately, in this case bloodshed and chaos will inevitably be exploited by the Islamists, and we can't afford to let that happen.
Message 17992269
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.
Message 17994352
In most cases where we interfered with the process of political evolution in developing countries, we did so in the firm conviction that the direction these processes were taking was inimical to our interests. In many cases we believed (or allowed ourselves to be convinced) that the action we were taking was in the best interest of the countries in question.
The development of democracy in any country is a long-term goal. This long-term goal frequently gets sidetracked in the interest of advancing more immediate agendas. These agendas come in many shapes and sizes, and are often unclear or packaged to look like what they aren’t. The US intervention in Iran in 1953 was taken in the firm belief that it was an action against communism, though in retrospect it had less to do with fighting communism than with protecting the interests of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Many dictators contrived to receive abundant American support, in the halcyon days of the Kirkpatrick doctrine, by portraying themselves as the sole alternative to creeping communism, though many of these portrayals were seriously exaggerated.
It is easy to subordinate the long-term goal of building a democracy and a nation to short-term goals. Unfortunately, there are many short term goals to be pursued in Iraq these days. We have ours, the war on terrorism being principal among them. The large oil companies have their own. Iraq’s neighbors, notably Turkey and Iran but others as well, will be inclined to meddle. Each of the sub-groups within Iraq has its own agenda, and it is wise to remember that the return of freedom to areas beset with ethnic strife is often accompanied by recurring outbreaks of ethnic hostility. India has been cited here as a model of a multiethnic developing state, but remember what happened when they first set out on that road? Look as well to the former Yugoslavia, where the freedom most welcomed by the populace seemed to be the freedom to kill as many of one another as possible. In Iraq the balance between ethnic/religious groups takes on menacing proportions. New leadership has to come from Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. The Shiite leadership is heavily tainted by connection to Iran and widely (and not entirely plausibly, IMO) denied Islamist sympathies. The Sunni leadership and the existing army are heavily tainted (particularly in the eyes of other Iraqis) by connections to Saddam. Kurdish leadership is not acceptable to the other Iraqis or to the Turks. The Kurdish situation is quietly shaping up to be a real problem: we have been repeatedly told that the Iraqi Kurds are practicing “democracy” (I have my doubts). The Kurds are saying now that they are not after a state, simply because they have to say that. I personally suspect that the Kurds will resist any attempt to re-integrate them into Iraq under Sunni or Shiite rule, and that any move toward Kurdish independence would be met by incursions from Turkey, doubtless in the guise of fighting terrorism.
I digress, but the point is clear: there’s an abundance of short-term interests that could derail Iraq’s progress toward democracy. Cultivating a democracy requires a lot of patience: we are not among the most patient of peoples, and we have urgent interests to pursue. Will we be willing to start what we finish?
Whether we choose to install a democracy or a compliant dictator, there are many things that could go badly wrong. A dictator would almost certainly turn to corruption and be very unpopular among certain sectors. A democracy could easily prove to be largely inutile for a number of years (I would say this is more a probability than a possibility – I’ve seen first hand how hard it is to make a government work after a long-entrenched dictator is removed). Serious corruption and abuse of power are also more than likely. In either case, disenchantment among the populace and serious unrest are more probabilities than possibilities. These situations are made to order for exploitation by the Islamists. The last thing we want is to install a government that can’t stand, but which we cannot afford to let fall. |
