As this unworthy election campaign heads toward its finale, there's a growing consensus among sections of the Right that John Kerry missed a trick. George Will puts it most forcefully: The Democratic nominee should have mounted "a root-and-branch critique of the stunningly anticonservative idea animating the administration's policy. The idea, a tenet of neoconservatism, is that all nations are more or less ready for democracy."
In other words, the Iraq project is founded on the kind of sappy cotton-candy delusion that hitherto only the most foolish multiculti liberals have fallen for.
First things first: There are several just-about-viable positions Senator Kerry could take on Iraq, and at one time or another he's taken most of them, sometimes on the same weekend. But running as Henry Kissinger isn't one of them. Hard-nosed foreign-policy realism necessarily involves taking a dimmer view of the natives than Democratic-party pieties will permit. That's why blaming it all on Halliburton works better as the default option.
As to whether "nation-building" is stunningly anticonservative, I can only speak for myself. I'm not a "neocon." I'm a foreigner and I have only a hazy grasp of what a neocon is. I'm a subject of Her Britannic Majesty and in my country, Canada, insofar as any of our institutions work, they do so because they derive from Britain. That's true of a lot of the world — St. Lucia, Australia, Mauritius, Singapore, South Africa, Tuvalu . . . It's worth considering, for example, what the Indian subcontinent would be like if it weren't the world's biggest Westminster-style democracy. Without the long British experience, it might look something like the Middle East — a patchwork of princely states presided over by sultans and maharajahs, Hindu and Muslim, punctuated by thug dictatorships following Baath-type local variations on fascism and Marxism. It would be a profoundly unstable region with a swollen uneducated citizenry of little use for call centers or tech support.
Can the Arabs be turned into Indians? I don't know. But I do know that a half-century of American "realpolitik" in the Middle East — the absurd inflation of the Saudi "royal" family, the lavish subsidies to the Mubaraks — brought us 9/11. The foreign-policy realists turned out to be totally unreal. So we need to do something else. P. J. O'Rourke takes the Will line a stage further: The U.S. military, he says, is good for blowing stuff up but not for any of this post-detonation "reconstruction" nonsense. So, if we have any problems with some two-bit dictator, we should go in, whack the bad guy, leave, and let the locals squabble over who gets to be the next bad guy. If he causes trouble, we whack him, and withdraw again. Repeat as necessary. From the U.S. taxpayer's point of view, this would be relatively inexpensive.
Posted by: tipper ||
10/01/2004 12:25:21 AM ||
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#1
"So, if we have any problems with some two-bit dictator, we should go in, whack the bad guy, leave, and let the locals squabble over who gets to be the next bad guy. If he causes trouble, we whack him, and withdraw again. Repeat as necessary."
Love it. Great Iran strategy. Minimal ground war except perhaps around the edges.
Posted by: Tom ||
10/01/2004 7:50 Comments ||
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#2
I love Steyn. But here I disagree. It is a first time this is being tried in ME context. It may not work, and then the rinse and repeat whack-a-dic may be a viable strategy. But if this works (and so far, it is a tie), there may be great rewards, because it may sway other nations in the ME to try the model (not necessarily apettitlich to their respective dictators). That would means the clash of civilizations would turn from a potential big bang into several loud party poppers. I am for the trial (and posibly error).
#3
And the deep and long history of democracy in Japan prior to 1945 was .... ?
Posted by: Don ||
10/01/2004 9:12 Comments ||
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#4
How to tell if they really believe that some people just can't *handle* democracy, or if it's just racism: apply what they say to the nations of Italy, Mexico, South Africa and India. In this case the author implies that India can *handle* democracy *only* because it was once ruled which Britain. But that doesn't hold water. There are lots of democracies that weren't colonies for a hundred years that evolved democracy. Take Italy for example. One of the most ungainly democracies around. Can the Italians *handle* democracy?
#5
I completely disagree with Steyn. I'm not sure if he believes this, or if he is just saying that's about the only position Kerry could have successfully taken in the debate.
Maybe Kerry will take note and try that out as position #12 in the next debate.
#6
rinse and repeat works great, if all you need to use is laundry detergent. In this case we're talking American (not Canadian) lives, money, and prestige. We either go the George Will route and Fugedaboutit, or we go the George Bush route and make democracy work, even if that involved dreaded nationbuilding.
#7
Anonymoose, then the apparent correlation of current democratic government with past British colonization is an illusion? It would be interesting to look at the democracies of the world and see how many follow conquest, occupation and colonization/reconstruction by Anglo-American forces. And I would include Italy in that category.
One area of interest to me is Eastern Europe. While it is clear we did not physically conquer it, I suspect we intellectually conquered it. The question we face in the absence of physical conquest is, how long intelectual conquest will take with third world countries.
Posted by: Mrs. Davis ||
10/01/2004 9:38 Comments ||
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#8
MD: One area of interest to me is Eastern Europe. While it is clear we did not physically conquer it, I suspect we intellectually conquered it. The question we face in the absence of physical conquest is, how long intelectual conquest will take with third world countries.
Many of these countries came into being after the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. They had democracies of a kind during the interwar years, until fascism took over in some countries, or the Nazis or the Soviets conquered them.
#9
Since I can't read the rest of the article, I can only speculate that Steyn is setting up the "Whack, rinse, repeat" method for rebuttal. For one thing, although fairly cheap for us, it means killing lots of foreigners for no visible advantage, which is the sort of thing which doesn't go down well with today's kinder, gentler public.
#11
For one thing, although fairly cheap for us, it means killing lots of foreigners for no visible advantage, which is the sort of thing which doesn't go down well with today's kinder, gentler public.
After a couple of whacks, those foreigners - assuming they are capable of reason - will become fearful of yet another swing of the hammer at their heads. Definitely not a visible advantage, but an advantage well worth having. As for the kinder, gentler public, well, they need to realize that those traits only have value when dealing with like minds. Otherwise, they're a weakness.
#12
The East European civil societies were not so throughly demolished as Saddam demolished Iraqi civil society. Within the rotten structure that collapsed were strong foundations for a new one.
Not so in Iraq, where the only non-Ba'athist social foundations were religious and illiberal ones. Saddam's Iraq was a thoroughly Stalinist state which destroyed almost all semblance of civil society. No political parties, unions, civil or porfessional associations. The only robust organizations independent of the regime were those dominated by imams like Sistani.
In hindsight we should have seen that if you smash a stalinist regime from the outside, you will have chaos, and to forestall that chaos you will need not elections but well-organized, confident, large civil associations headed by credible and experienced leaders. Outside of Kurdistan, the only Iraqi who fit, and fits, that bill is Sistani. Therefore the only real shot at avoiding postwar chaos would have been to get Sistani on our side and to ensure his explicit or tacit approval for everything we did after overthrowing Saddam. Not having Sistani's support in postwar Iraq is roughly equivalent to overthrowing the Polish communist regime and being violently opposed by the Polish Catholic Church.
So to my thinking whether Iraq can be democratic is really not up to us but up to Sistani and other powerful imams. Jury's out on this.
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