COLUMN: Democracy in Iraq? Hold your horses
Allow me to preface this rant with a small disclaimer: Contrary to popular opinion, I do not scour the pages of this newspaper spoiling for a fight with conservatives over every bit of right-wing propaganda.
Frankly, I don’t deem it my birthright to crack the whip on, say, every argument endorsing the quagmire in Iraq (yes, I subscribe to this “anti-war rhetoric”). But there are sometimes a few half-truths that beg for a good spanking.
I stumbled on one such morsel of misinformation during Week of Welcome – as always, among the ever-interesting letters to the editor. The writer wasn’t too thrilled about the Democratic candidate for president.
“John Kerry has vacillated in his stance toward Iraq,” he wrote, deriding the Vietnam vet as a “pendulum in a grandfather clock.”
Ho-hum!
I’ll spare you a lengthy rebuttal. Suffice to say, I believe the truth about our invasion of Iraq is infinitely more complex, and Kerry’s “dance,” as the writer put it, reflects the difficulty of the decision. And it should have been a difficult one, despite the plain-as-day picture right-wing ideologues love to paint.
Yes, of course Saddam Hussein wasn’t an epitome of virtue, but there was never a compelling reason to go to war in a hurry – save for that manufactured paranoia about nonexistent Weapons of Mass Destruction.
As Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria pointed out last month, we didn’t have to sideline the United Nations, expel weapons inspectors, deploy insufficient troops to maintain order and stability, “ignore completely the State Department’s postwar planning … pack the Governing Council with unpopular exiles, disband the Army and engage in radical de-Baathification” – among other major blunders.
Sure, Kerry might have agreed with Bush’s assessment of Hussein as political scum, but that does not mean the president’s half-baked, muddled approach was the only way to deal with the problem. Agreement on the existence of a problem does not necessarily imply an agreement on policy – and where policy is concerned, we had options.
Enough said.
There’s another aspect of this whole debate that should concern the thinking mind. It’s that troubling question about instituting a sustainable democracy in Iraq. As things stand, an Iraqi democracy is a pipe dream made in America.
Listen to Zakaria, speaking at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress: “What we mean in the West by democracy is really a liberal democracy which comprises two traditions: Constitutional liberalism and elections.”
Constitutional liberalism encompasses everything fine and cheering about America: The rule of law, separation of powers and First Amendment freedoms. Here, many of these traditions were established long before we were even a democratic state.
Fledgling democracies in the modern world follow the process of democratization in reverse. But that doesn’t always work.
“If you look at the past four decades, the Third World is littered with examples of democracies that have gone awry,” Zakaria said.
Then there’s the matter of Iraq’s oil wealth.
“There is only one oil-rich country today that is a functioning democracy – Norway, and Norway acquired its democracy a lot earlier than it found its oil,” Zakaria noted. “If you have treasure in the ground, you don’t need to do the hard work of earning money, creating a modern state with a framework of laws and policies that create the rule of law. You just drill a hole in the ground.”
Elections in Iraq will ensure only that a democratic process is put in operation, but that may not automatically lead to democracy.
Furthermore, given the Islamization of Iraqi politics, you can bet your bottom dollar on the emergence of a democratically elected Shiite theocracy. And that is in no one’s best interests, least of all the United States.
Rather than noisily proclaiming the birth of an “infant democracy” in Iraq, Republican warmongers ought to lobby the administration for a rapid internationalization of the reconstruction effort under the auspices of the UN. No more neoconservative nonsense about the world body being the Great Satan.
International support is our only shot at any kind of long-term accomplishment in Iraq.
The president’s posse would do well to remember the words of John Adams: “Remember, democracy never lasts long,” Adams warned. “It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
Leon D’Souza is a senior majoring in print journalism. Comments can be sent to leon@cc.usu.edu.