It was an exercise in wishful thinking, and the
headline summed it up quite neatly: “U.S. Is Completing Plan to
Promote a Democratic Iraq.” In other words, the White House wants
to install a democracy in a place that has never enjoyed one
before, or even shown much interest in acquiring one. The White
House wants to do some nation building, and according to the story
beneath the headline, this “would amount to the most ambitious
American effort to administer a country since the occupations of
Japan and Germany at the end of World War II.”
Presumably the Bush Administration is serious about this,
although you never know. The story was planted in the New York
Times, and whether you believed it to be true or not, it had a
practical purpose. It was intended to deflect criticism in the Arab
world and elsewhere, and to show that in ousting Saddam Hussein the
U.S. has only the highest of motives. “Mr. Bush’s team,” the
Times reported, is trying “to allay concerns that the
United States would seek to be a colonial power in Iraq.”
And no doubt that’s true. A docile Iraq would certainly be in
our best interest, although the U.S. is not good at colonialism,
and must look for other ways to bring that docility about. The
other problem, though, is that we are not very good at nation
building, either.
Consider the record on this. Somalia was a disaster, and when
Madeleine Albright trilled about nation building there she was
properly derided. At the same time “Operation Uphold Democracy” was
supposed to transform Haiti, but tiny Haiti is as benighted as
ever. And despite the brave talk about democratizing Afghanistan,
warlords control the country, while its president reigns only in
Kabul.
But nation building is a serious matter, and so is
democratization, and Iraq, in fact, is a rotten candidate for
either. For one thing, it’s barely a country. In its previous
existence it was three separate provinces in the Ottoman Empire.
Then it became a British mandate. That ended in 1932, whereupon the
tribes and clans there stopped trying to kill the Brits, and
resumed their traditional business of killing one another.
Meanwhile Iraq is still made up of separate communities — Sunni
and Shiite Arabs, Turcomans, Kurds, Yazidis, Christians — and as
nearly as one can determine there is no sense of nationhood among
them. The Kurds have been butchered, while the minority Sunnis
oppress the majority Shiites. Indeed it would be easier, and more
practical, to dismember Iraq than to democratize it. It never
should have been a country in the first place.
But according to the story in the Times, the White
House will have none of that. Anonymous administration officials
say the Pentagon is preparing for a military occupation of Iraq of
at least 18 months, but that a civilian administrator would run the
country’s economy, as well as its schools, and social and political
institutions. And at the same time, of course, he will also build a
democracy.
The principal champions in the Administration for this nation
building apparently are Pentagon civilians, as well as people in
and around, and possibly including, Dick Cheney, and assorted
neo-cons both in and out of the White House. They all should know
better, but they don’t, and they seem to think they are on a divine
mission: regime change in Iraq today, and then on to the rest of
the Middle East, and maybe the Far East tomorrow.
Indeed you may think of them as the intellectual heirs of Leon
Trotsky. He wanted to make the world a better place, and free the
oppressed with what he called a permanent revolution. The neo-cons,
in particular, want to do this, too, but our foreign policy would
be in better hands if they didn’t.
