Ezra Klein wonders of anyone still remembers it. I still like my November 2006 article wondering the same thing.
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Arab Spring
16 Sep 2007 09:01 am
Comments (8)
Now is the winter of our discontent. And it's gonna be a long one.
Southpaw, one *can* reasonably whether they likely want what the administration wanted - a state which was an ally of Israel, eager to give away oil at below-market prices, subservient to a foreign power, and a willing lackey in that foreign power's wars.
Of course one can reasonably question the administration's motives. One can also reasonably questions whether Iraqis would have preferred an american intervention to living under the thumb of the Hussein family regime in perpetuity. None of that was my point . . .
As a method of deducing what course of foreign policy we should follow, consulting the desires of the foreign population sounds like a necessary imperative. But when we're not talking about a free society, those desires probably cannot be reliably discerned.
We cannot today, for instance, base our policy toward North Korea on our reading of what the North Korean people want.
Matt - I know you like this one.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/03/10/the_arab_spring/
There seriously needs to be a compilation of bad Iraq punditry and predictions. Just for laughs.
Aleks:
As though he were imitating Friedman, Jacoby actually says: "Let us pray the long winter of Arab discontent gives way to a summer of liberty and human rights"
"If you've agreed with President Bush all along that the way to fight the cancer of Islamist terrorism is with the chemotherapy of freedom and democracy, the temptation to issue I-told-you-so's can be hard to resist." ----Jeff Jacoby
lol. Chemotherapy can actually have the effect of hastening death.
I think the fallacy behind all the democracy in the Middle East excitement (and the larger fallacy driving much US policy around the world) is that a democracy and a free society are one and the same.
Isn't Iran (aside from occupied Iraq) the only democracy in the Middle East? I guess Bush and his brethren would not like to define it that way, but by the criteria they use, Iran certainly qualifies. It has regular contested elections (although from a pool approved by the imams). But is Iran a free society? While arguably far from the most oppressive of middle eastern governments, Iran is far from free.
Fareed Zakaria in his book The Future of Freedom makes this important distinction abundantly clear. I often disagree with Zakaria, but in this case he's really on to something. It's important to remember that the foundation of a free society, unbridgeable rights, are fundamentally undemocratic. And far more important than elections to a free society are corruption free institutions that have the trust of the people--a fair court system for one, a trustworthy police force for another. This fetishizing of elections by the Bush administration makes for great stirring speechifying, but the imposition of elections on a broken society can do more harm than good.
This is not to say that Arab peoples aren't good enough for democracy or don't want democracy. Clearly they do want it. But democracy generally evolved very slowly in the west, and always with anti-democratic safeguards in place to make sure things didn't get out of hand. We may decry these systems from a distance and clearly these 18th and 19th century western governments weren't without flaws. But I think they have a lesson to teach us as well.
What was so foolish about the cheerleaders of the so-called Arab Spring was that they bought into the rhetoric that all you needed to make a free society was hold an election. By now everyone should realize that this is not nearly enough.
Comments closed September 30, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Under these circumstances, democratization -- the shared passion of many Republicans and Democrats alike -- is doomed to fail. Any political opening will only bring to power forces we don't like and will try to bat down, further increasing resentment of the United States and only ensuring things will be even worse the next time around. This is not to say that we should be blithely unconcerned with internal political developments elsewhere. Rather, the point is that, whatever we hope to accomplish, the only way we can do anything constructive is to begin draining from the American approach to the Middle East the overwhelming stench of imperialism that's surrounded it for decades. We need to operate through legitimate mechanisms, establish rules of the road that we and our allies will actually follow and, most of all, operate with a sensitivity to the actual desires and priorities of people who live in the region. Faced with a disaster the scale of our current policies, saying "sorry" and then trying the same thing over again isn't good enough.
That's well said. But how exactly do you measure the desires and priorities of people who live in a police state? Would it have been possible, for instance, to adduce evidence of the Iraqi people's desires in 2002? And if they don't desire democracy, should we then be comfortable abandoning its cause?
Posted by southpaw | September 16, 2007 10:31 AM